


put your kingdom up for sale

by heartunsettledsoul



Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: Enemies to Friends to Lovers, F/M, M/M, Mentions of Stalking, Mentions of Violence, Mentions of alcoholism, Serpents au, Slow Burn, Southside Serpent Jughead Jones, Stalking is canon-level of black hood nonsense, and flip some of these tropes on their head, background Kevin Keller/Fangs Fogarty - Freeform, because I've been dying to try my hand at it for a while, bookstore owner betty cooper, i'll update as i go!, mentions of drinking, please let me know if you need anything else tagged!, though it's more like grudging acquaintances to friends to lovers
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-05-03
Updated: 2020-01-21
Packaged: 2020-02-09 09:08:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 32,736
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18635101
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/heartunsettledsoul/pseuds/heartunsettledsoul
Summary: “So now that the literal tea is done, I have tea to spill. Fangs said some hometown friends are coming back and I hear they’re all very attractive.”or, Betty has finally found a place to belong.And Jughead is finally coming home.





	1. gold dust woman

**Author's Note:**

> you have no idea how long I've been waiting to think of the perfect fic to use fleetwood mac lyrics in the title for.
> 
> endless thanks to my lovely beta iconic-ponytail and to my fav cheerleaders jugandbettsdetectiveagency & canariesrise!

_rulers make bad lovers_ _  
_ _you better put your kingdom up for sale_  
"gold dust woman," fleetwood mac

 

* * *

 

 

It’s dark out, and pouring rain, and the Riverdale High marching band is playing in the background, like a cheerful and ill-fitting Greek chorus to the standoff Jughead has found himself in.

He’s bleeding from the right arm and his gun is unsteady in his left hand, made all the more unstable from the rain-slicked handle. Three more guns are pointed at him, one of his fellow Serpents is crumpled on the ground groaning in pain and two more have guns pressed to their temples.

They are in deep shit.

“You’re in deep shit, Jonesy,” Penny taunts, somehow directly in his head. He wonders if this is how they've been caught, if he's not as clever as he thinks. If he couldn't actually outsmart her. “I’ve got you and your slithering buddies now. Say your final prayers because nobody crosses me without consequences.” She steps forward to him, agonizingly slow, until she’s so close that Jughead can see the angry whites of her kohl-rimmed eyes.

It’s cold on his forehead, the barrel of the gun. Despite the trilling flutes and heavy drums echoing in his ears, Jughead can still hear his friends’ sharp intakes of breath at the movement of guns pressing against their own temples.

He isn’t one for prayer, can count the number of times he’s been in a church on one hand, but Penny’s words stick in his head and Jughead finds himself searching the depths of his mind for the words to the Hail Mary.

_Hail Mary, full of Grace._

“What’s a Serpent Prince without all his knights, d’ya think, Jonesy? Maybe I should let you live on knowing your friends are all dead because of you, hmm?”

 _The Lord is with you—_ no, _thee. Blessed are those—_

A muffled pop echoes through the night, the silencer on one of Penny’s goon’s guns not doing its job properly, and Jughead lets out a strangled sob. The gun presses harder still onto his forehead, both making his thoughts settle and move faster.

— _among women, and blessed is the—the something—_ fuck.

Another pop, louder this time, an even shittier silencer.

He’s crying now, tears tracking down his face for the first time in what feels like an age.

“Poor little Serpent Prince, thought he had the whole kingdom at his feet, thought he could play games with a fucking ice queen. Nope, not today, kid.” The cold steel moves away and for a brief, wild moment, Jughead thinks Penny is just screwing with him. It’s just for a second, though, the gun that's trained on him leaving only for the time it takes to fire off another shot. There’s no silencer on this one and the sound guts him.

 _Blessed is the fruit...?_ Right, _blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus._

“All alone now, Jonesy. Soak it in, you’re alone and it’s all your fault.” Penny’s voice is venomous in his ears, whispering so close that if not for the gun and the death and the violence, it could be a lover’s voice telling him sweet nothings. “I kinda want you to live like this, but you’ve pissed me off too much, little prince.”

_Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us sinners—_

Jughead can hear everything so acutely that he knows when Penny’s forefinger squeezes against the trigger.

_—now and at the hour of our death, ame—_

The loud crash is so startling that Jughead lurches awake, gasping and sweating. _Not real, not real, not real,_ he chants to himself, as he finds himself needing to do more often lately. Still, he rubs at the center of his forehead, feeling the ghost of Penny’s gun.

“It’s going to rain,” Sweet Pea gripes as he slams the door of the apartment shut behind him, having swung it open with such force it had scared Jughead into consciousness.

Jughead looks up from the couch, ignoring how his movement disrupts the perfect arrangement to avoid the heavy sag of the replacement cushion. “Oh you can predict the weather now, Pea?”

“No, jackass.” Something from the table by the door comes flying at his head, a pen, maybe. “My leg hurts like a motherfucker and it only ever does that when it’s gonna storm. Barometric pressure or something like that.”

There’s more he wants to say, to razz on his friend and ask if he even knows how to spell _barometric_ but Jughead snaps his mouth shut. Sweet Pea is clearly in a mood and Jughead knows he’s in a glass house from which he cannot throw stones; the bullet wound on his best friend’s thigh is Jughead’s fault, after all.

Though they’ve all gotten over the initial guilt and apologies and moved on, Sweet Pea will deal it as a low blow when in a particularly foul mood, which only serves to kick off Jughead’s own spiral of self-deprecation. He’s only just pulled himself out of the most recent one and the last thing he needs right now is a sour _hey remember when your boneheaded plan quite literally could have gotten me killed._

As though reading the rapid fire thoughts in Jughead’s mind, Sweet Pea fixes him with a look. “Don’t you start again. I do not need to be on the receiving end of another one of Toni’s ‘there’s only enough room for one drama queen in this apartment’ speech.”

“Which of you is being the drama queen?” Toni yells from the kitchen. “I will kick both of your sorry asses.”

Sweet Pea raises his eyebrows as if to say _I told you so._  

“Not me,” mutters Jughead as Toni strides into the room with more gravitas and physical presence than anyone of her short stature has any right to have. The look on her face shows that she knows it’s his dramatics and that she will not tolerate it in that moment.

There’s a tense standoff brewing. It’s right on schedule, about five months of as smooth sailing as they can get with three people living in a shoebox two-bedroom with five minimum wage jobs, one elephant in the room, and nowhere to go. The last time they’d all gotten sick of each other, Toni went out clubbing until she found someone to go home with for an entire week straight, Sweet Pea decided to teach himself to play guitar, and Jughead found himself at the bottom of a truly garbage bottle of tequila and wondering if his father’s preferred coping mechanism was just that, or a death wish wrapped in shiny packaging.

On the coffee table, Jughead’s phone breaks the silence. As the cheapest thing in the store, its vibrations are obnoxiously loud and only amplified by the uneven legs of the street-side find that rattles on the floor with each ring.

He glances at the number and turns back to Toni, preparing to make a half-hearted apology, but then he whips back to stare at it. He knows that area code, they all do. At his reaction, Toni and Sweet Pea lean in to check it warily.

“Is that…?”

“I’m not fucking answering it,” Jughead snaps.

“No,” Toni insists. “Not the area code. The actual number. Is that who I think it is?”

Jughead swipes his thumb across the screen to answer it on speaker and his tentative hello dies on his lips. Apprehension melts into relief when he recognizes the excited voice on the other end.

“Dude, listen, it’s me. I think—I think you’re clear. I just got word from Keller and his dad that the feds busted up a ring that was running coke across the border, Montreal all the way down to Manhattan. It was Penny’s crew. They got all of them.” Jughead swears. Behind him, Toni sets a shaking hand on his shoulder to steady herself. Sweet Pea’s face is ashen. “I think you guys can come home now.”   

 

It takes everything in his power for Jughead to not throw his meager belongings into his dad’s old Army duffel, strap it to his motorcycle, and ride directly to Riverdale.

That Sweet Pea is the one to talk him down—Sweet Pea, who grudgingly followed him out of town, who moped the entire first year, who’s often found quickly closing out of Facebook tabs of their friends back home—is a total surprise to Jughead.

“Dude,” reasons his friend. “We have a _life_ here. We gotta tie up loose ends, yanno, do all that responsible adult shit we forced ourselves into?”

“We’ll have to negotiate breaking our lease,” Toni chimes in.

Fuck their lease, Jughead wants to say. They’re in a dirty, fleabag, glorified triple broom closet of an apartment in the ghetto of Toledo and he couldn’t care less about paying their sketchy landlord to bounce out early. He’s practically itching to pull his Serpents jacket out from its hiding place in the depths under his bed. The adrenaline and anticipation has him fidgeting worse than he did during the nicotine withdrawal after Toni said she would kick him out if he smoked inside one more time. Now more than ever, he wishes he had a lighter on him, if only to have something to do with his hands.

When Sweet Pea speaks again, it’s with an air of finality. The decision is made, without Jughead’s input, and it’s clear that he’ll be in deep trouble with his friends—his _lifelines_ these past two years—if he tries to lone wolf it. “We’ll get our shit in order, then we go home. Another couple of weeks won’t kill us.”

It will kill Jughead, but he keeps his mouth shut.

His lack of complaint catches their attention and Toni must see the tick in his jaw, the only evidence of his extreme frustration.

“Jug.” Her voice is softer, free from the hard edge of practicality. “It’ll be worth the extra time if it means we don’t have to come back out here multiple times. Isn’t going home for good better than back and forth for god knows how long?”

It is worth it. It takes Jughead an excruciating eleven days to recognize this, and then another three weeks of cruel anticipation, but once all of his things are crammed into a backpack and the duffel, their five respective jobs are quit, all their crappy furniture is left on the curb for the dumpster divers, and three sets of keys are deposited in their landlord’s mailbox, the weight on his shoulders lifts.

 _Home,_ he thinks as his bike engine turns over. They’re finally going home.

 

* * *

 

 

As with every morning, Betty wakes up before the sun rises and before her alarm goes off. She’s able to revel in the peace and quiet of the morning, some of the only time she’ll allow for just herself.  Sometimes she’s able to enjoy the early rays of sunshine and chirping birds, think of a new recipe she wants to bake or theorize what will happen in the book she’s currently reading. The early morning moments are pure and unmarred by her usual anxieties while her brain is still waking up. By design, Betty’s day is laser focused on spending time with others. From the moment her bare feet hit the floor of her bedroom until the very moment she slips them back under the covers, Betty runs at a million miles an hour to be there for others.

She opens up the shop each day so that Kevin doesn’t need to get up early, but still goes on runs with him after closing; brews extra cups of her artisan tea for JB, the spunky high schooler she’s taken under her wing, before school; leaves dishes out by the back door for the stray cats and the neighborhood dog; cooks dinner most nights in the main house kitchen for her and Cheryl, then stays up with her cousin talking or watching movies until they’re both yawning, and Betty will only return to her space in the guest house once every dish and wine glass is cleaned.

Run ragged and sleep heavy in her limbs, Betty often falls asleep the second her head hits the pillow.

It’s purposeful that the only time Betty is truly alone is the five or ten or twenty minutes she has between rubbing sleep out of her eyes and the shrill ring of her phone’s alarm.  Once her brain is alert and ready for the day, it’s too hard to stop it from wandering toward bad memories and _what if’_ s.  The therapist she’d gone to prior to moving to Riverdale to live with Cheryl had called it “unhealthy forms of coping,” and said that “sooner or later you’ll have to deal with what you’ve been through.”

Betty had chosen later.

It’s easier to barter with herself that she was the one who got off lucky; she was the victim whose stalking didn’t end in brutal murder, she is alive and breathing and Betty knows she should be—and _is_ —grateful for that. So, as she grew up being reminded by her parents, Betty smiles and nods and grits her teeth to get through the day.

(Coopers don’t show weakness, Coopers always put their best foot forward and smile with all their teeth. Coopers don’t acknowledge trauma; so much so that Betty Cooper said nothing about the debacle to her family about being stalked and nearly killed. It took more of Cheryl’s money and not-so-thinly-veiled threats to journalists to keep Betty’s name from the press, but it worked like a charm. Miraculously, even though Alice Cooper herself covered much of the Black Hood case, Betty’s mother never found out about Betty nearly becoming a victim.

Betty was already half-estranged from her family, so the forced isolation from the Black Hood didn’t set off the alarm bells for her parents or sister like it had for her hometown friends. Veronica and Archie still don’t know either. And still haven’t forgiven Betty for leaving them high and dry.)

Yes, she has four locks, two door blockers, and the very best security system money can buy. And yes, she insisted on the same for Cheryl’s house in addition to the guest house. Yes, Betty has no fewer than three methods of defense within reach at any given moment (mace in her purse, brass knuckles on her key ring, pocket knife in her jeans, or clipped to her bra band if she’s in a dress). Yes, she’s had Kevin’s boyfriend teach her how to box, despite Fangs still being cagey about _why_ he knows so much about out-of-the-ring fighting techniques.

All of that is for her peace of mind and it does the trick.

Regardless, the Black Hood is rotting in prison. There will be no more taunting phone calls, no break-ins, no hands grabbing out for her in the dark. And as long as Betty isn’t left alone with her thoughts for too long, her breathing stays even and everything is fine.

Completely, totally fine.

This morning may have wrenched her from sleep with a nightmare haunted by 50s pop songs and hot breath on her neck, but Betty needn’t have worried about it ruining her day because when she rolls over to check how much time is left before her alarm, she’s greeted with a text from her mother.

**_Doing a segment on Polly’s law firm today. The name partner at the firm is working a nationally newsworthy pro-bono case. See what completed degrees can get you?_ **

Like all of the passive aggressive texts above that one in the conversation thread with Alice Cooper, it goes unanswered. There are many things Betty would love to say in response— _Sorry we can’t all be perfect paralegals with the picket fence and blonde-haired, blue-eyed twins and the doting husband; Wish I could have finished my degree and gone to J-school like you’d planned since I could walk; Trust me I didn’t like dropping out of college either, but there was this pesky serial killer stalking me and I had a nervous breakdown; Fuck off, Mom—_ but she simply gets up, starts the coffee maker, and carries on with her day.

 

 

“Morning, cousin!”

At nearly 11am, Betty has been up and moving for hours, but Cheryl is only just starting the day. Betty supposes that’s the luxury of growing up independently wealthy and then inheriting your family’s real estate company when they decide to retire to the Caribbean.

As always, Cheryl looks woefully out of place in Mysterious Letters. Betty wanted the bookstore to feel homey and comfortable and so she furnished it, much to Cheryl’s chagrin, with vintage furniture, mismatched shelving, and a flea-market-found collection of lamps with (most) letters of the alphabet scattered about the space. In her designer sunglasses, stilettos, and tailored red blazer, Cheryl does not match the decor.

“Hi, Cher,” Betty hums from behind the counter. “Tea, coffee, book, or gossip session with Kevin?”

Cheryl peers over the rim of her sunglasses. “Darling cousin, when have I ever come in here to actually read?”

From the back, Betty hears Kevin shouting something indistinguishable and Betty laughs. “Gossip, then. Give a shout when you’re ready to go to lunch.”

The faint scent of her cousin’s perfume lingers by the counter and Betty thinks it adds a nice ambiance. She makes a mental note to go to the market later for bouquets of flowers, and then continues planning the store’s next few Instagram posts. The number of people who will get the joke is likely few and far between—after all, she’s had to explain the Nancy Drew origins of the store’s name to everyone in town—but Betty still moves to the _Plays & Scripts _ corner to pull a copy of _Julius Caesar_ and a few other Shakespeares from the shelf before googling puns on the Ides of March. If it makes her smile, it’s good enough.

In the end, Betty is more than happy with how her life is, especially considering how it could have gone. Could have _ended._ She’s opened a business she’s in love with, learned to love the town quirks like there being three yarn shops but one grocery store or that the local garage is more popular for drinking than the actual bar, and created a life that gives her a reason to get out of bed in the morning. It took some time both for Betty to settle in and for the town to accept a stranger whose only tie to their home was Cheryl, but Riverdale was Betty’s sorely-needed fresh start.

By the time the Black Hood was behind bars, Betty didn’t have much left of her life in Boston, her tormentor having seen fit to that. Cheryl had been her saving grace, the only relationship the Black Hood hadn’t sussed out, having been primarily long distance and via phone, and thus the only person in Betty’s family who knows the whole story. With Cheryl five years her senior and living all the way in upstate New York, Betty hadn’t been close to her growing up but in the age of social media they reconnected and bonded over what cousins only can: their miserable families.

True to form, Betty hadn’t let Cheryl know how bad things had gotten with the stalking until it was nearly too late. Upon Betty’s accidental slip-up on the phone when she reached her absolute breaking point and left school, Cheryl came into town with the force of a hurricane, an elite team of private investigators and security on her payroll, and it wasn’t long before Betty’s living nightmare ended.  

As time wore on and it became increasingly obvious that staying in Boston was not the right choice for Betty’s stability, Cheryl insisted Betty come live with her in Riverdale. Their friendship had been surface level at the start—talking gossip and bad dates and the latest Netflix binges—but Betty quickly learned that Cheryl’s love is all-encompassing, if not a little misdirected in its outlets, like sending $400 French chocolates on days Betty had exams or telling her the outfit she’d chosen to go out in was horribly unflattering. But they’d bonded prior to the Black Hood and even more so during the tail end of Betty’s ordeal, so she cut her lease and packed her bags for Riverdale.

Betty had never been to Cheryl’s hometown, the Blossom side of the family only ever seeing the Coopers at family events in Massachusetts, and had been worried it would be far too much for her if it were the kind of place Cheryl made her life in. Instead, Betty was pleasantly surprised both in Cheryl and in Riverdale; the town had the quaint, old-timey vibe of the more historic Boston neighborhoods, the people were friendly and welcoming—if a bit curious and nosy as to why a bright young city girl would come to little ol’ Riverdale— and nobody knew a single thing about Betty nearly being the Black Hood’s sixth victim.

Betty moved in with Cheryl and never looked back.

The shop came later, when Betty began returning to a tentative sort of “normal” and found herself in a rut of boredom. Amazon box after Amazon box piled up at Cheryl’s doorstep as Betty tried to read her way into submission and had been crestfallen to discover the Riverdale Library downsized and shut its doors after the librarian Old Mrs. Grundy passed away.

“ _Please,_ Betty, I beg of you. I’ll let you use one of the open storefronts in town, but you have got to get these insane piles of books out of the house.”

Cheryl had meant it as a halfhearted joke, but Betty doesn’t do anything halfway. She inspected all of the open Blossom Real Estate commercial properties, negotiated a contract with Cheryl, and thus Mysterious Letters was born.

It’s her sanctuary now and Betty wouldn’t trade the home she’s made for herself in Riverdale for anything.

 

 

The second Betty’s eyes open that morning, something about the day feels off. Her skin crawls with nerves—not in the subdued, almost normalized way that she’s come to accept as her post-traumatic anxiety, but in a prickly, tense way.

Something akin to dogs knowing when a storm is coming.

On her way out the door, she returns once, twice, three times—forgetting first her bag, then the store keys, then her cell phone. She is by no means late, but just enough on the side of “not early” for JB to have beaten her there.

“You know, you really should just give me a key,” the teen sing-songs. “I could be late for _class_ now, Betty.”

The off-kilter hum of the day rights itself ever so slightly with JB’s presence, her familiar face a warm welcome and a standard part of the morning. “You know there’s an actual cafe about fifty feet away, right?” Betty answers, matching her tone.

“And drink their shitty tea on a day I have a chem exam? Fat chance.” JB holds out her travel mug expectantly and Betty takes it with a roll of her eyes. As she pulls a clean infuser from a drawer and flicks on the kettle, she sees a new sticker among the collection. A homemade print, clear from the slightly crooked cut that stands out from the numerous band logos and nonprofits. On a green background lies an intricate knot of what looks to be snakes, penned in darker green.

“New art?” Betty calls behind her, lifting the mug to signal her meaning.

“Oh. Right.” JB’s voice sounds different, but Betty can’t place the emotion behind it. If she didn’t know her as the straight-A band geek she was, Betty would say JB sounded— _shifty._

There’s no opportunity to inquire once the back door swings open, Kevin practically bouncing in. “Aren’t you going to be late, nerd?” he throws in the direction of their singular patron.

“Watched pot never boils,” Betty sighs from behind the counter. She _wants_ the kettle to boil faster, partially so she can give JB her tea and ensure she’s not the cause of tardiness, but also so she can shut herself in the back office to collect herself properly for the day.

When the water is poured and the mug capped, Betty reaches over the counter to tuck it in the side pocket of JB’s worn-out backpack, as covered in pins and patches as the mug is with stickers. “Go, go, go. Text me how chem goes.”

“Thanks, B!”

There are ten seconds of blissful silence and then—

“So now that the literal tea is done, I have _tea_ to spill. Fangs said some hometown friends are coming back and I hear they’re all very attractive.”

The proximity of Kevin’s voice startles Betty so badly that she knocks over the tea she’d poured for herself, the liquid drenching her notebook and bag where they still sit next to the till. Betty counts to five in her head and rolls her neck to release one of the cricks left over from sleep. “Can you just—can you give me like half an hour, Kev? Bad anxiety morning.”

Her friend’s excitement melts into sympathy and it’s this exact reason that Betty hates pulling the anxiety card. Sympathy feels so, so close to pity. Kevin is one of the few people in town who knows her full history and the series of events that lead her to take up residence in his ‘podunk hometown.’ He treats her normally, not like she’s made of glass, but every once in a while those flashes of pity break through. “Of course,” he nods. “Go hide in the back as long as you need, I’ve got up front covered for now.”

It’s not until Betty slips into the office and closes the door behind her that she notices her hands clenched into fists. Swearing, she slowly unfurls each finger and prays for no blood. There’s none, mercifully, but it’s been longer than usual between her self-manicures and there are angry half-moon welts across both her palms.

 

* * *

 

At age eight, Jughead put on his dad’s big leather jacket with the cool snake patch for the first time. He’d been small for his age, getting nicknamed “shrimp” and “peewee” on the playground despite his already ridiculous name _and_ nickname, so the sleeves came well over his hands and he almost had to bend over to reach the zipper.

Dad always looked strong and confident in the jacket and Jughead wanted to feel that way too. Maybe he could finally sit in a booth at Pop’s and not get funny looks from the preppy Northsider kids, could go to school without the older kids making fun of his hat and his names and his height.

The modeling of Dad’s coat was poorly timed, his mom coming home exhausted with a screaming three-year-old on her hip, and a bag of groceries in the hand struggling to turn the handle. Both carry-ons dropped when she saw Jughead.

At first he’d thought she was mad for messing around with Dad’s stuff, the way she gets annoyed when he rearranges the kitchen cabinets out of boredom. This was something different though. “Take that _fucking thing_ off right this second, Forsythe.”

Chin wobbling, he’d done as he was told. He didn’t want to cry, not when Jellybean is already wailing and he’s supposed to be the big kid. More importantly, he didn’t want to make Mom more mad than she already was. She’s always more upset when Jelly is crying anyway; if she’s yelling at him now, it might only be worse if the tears threatening to spill over start to fall.

He hangs it back on the hook by the door, straightening it carefully and trailing his fingers over the vibrant yellow of the snake’s two sets of eyes. This snake is different from the one Dad’s friends and  the _big_ big kids wear, the circular one that swallows its own tail. This one has two heads, forming a dangerous ‘S’ shape, and the top head has a tiny golden crown stitched on crudely—clearly added after the original patch was sewn in.

Every day after that, the crowned snake watches him from across the tiny trailer, all the way up until the day Jughead gets his own. He’s sixteen and formerly fresh-faced, but now beaten blue for his final initiation. His ribs are bruised and his split lip is bleeding so badly it runs down his torn shirt. Again, his chin wobbles on the verge of tears, but tears absolutely aren’t an option now. Not when FP Jones Jr., leader of the Southside Serpents delivers the last crushing blow of the gauntlet, right into his son’s stomach.

For the first time Jughead can remember, his dad looks at him with something akin to pride as he tosses a new leather jacket in his direction. His snake has two heads. He’s a legacy.

Royalty.

Six years after, Jughead’s own poorly stitched crown is on both snake heads, one piece of many in the fiasco that landed him exiled, 500 miles from home. It feels good to wear the jacket again, like a second skin he can never shed, even if it’s spent two years shoved in a bag inside a bag inside a suitcase for fear of identification.

Sweet Pea rolls his eyes when Jughead zips on the jacket as they all load in their belongings; his and Toni’s bikes are secured in the bed of Toni’s janky pickup truck, neither willing to ride unprotected in early March.

“Goddamn idiot,” he mutters. “Flag us down when your fingers are numb in twenty minutes.”

To spite him, Jughead suffers an entire ninety minutes of cold wind whipping down the collar of his Serpents jacket before flashing his lights and asking Toni to pull over on side of I-90. He rubs some feeling back into his gloved hands before giving Sweet Pea the finger. Long after he’s finally warmed up, Jughead keeps the jacket on.

He can’t bear to take it off, not after he’s only just gotten it back.

It stays on for the duration of the drive, a reminder of the life he’s about to return to. Jughead zips it back up when, on the final leg of the drive, they pull over next to the _Now Entering Riverdale_ sign to unload their bikes and go their separate ways. Years ago, they’d tagged it with the Serpents’ S, though it’s long since been painted over. Where the out of place patch of blue paint once was, it’s the same overly-cheerful postcard image, but brighter and with fresher coloring, Perhaps a newly painted sign for a new era.

Jughead fights the childish urge to pull out his switchblade and carve his initials into the wooden frame, something that can’t be so easily erased.

 

* * *

 

 

Betty hears the roar of motorcycles blast through Main Street and briefly wonders if Fangs’ friends Kevin had mentioned are here. Something about the cough of the exhaust, each motor building on top of each other, feels more ominous than when Fangs and FP ride around town on theirs. Maybe it’s because she can hear that at least one of the bikes needs a new engine filter and the lack of maintenance and care for the ride sets her teeth on edge.

Maybe it’s just her not-so-back-burner anxiety boiling over at the thought of new people to meet and prove herself to. One or two or three more sets of eyes taking in the out of towner girl who settled in their hometown out of the blue, wondering why the hell she wanted to be there.

Maybe it’s something else entirely.

Unable to shake the uneasy feeling, Betty busies herself with closing up. There are tables to wipe down, mugs to put in the dishwasher, cash to count, and—if she’s feeling particularly anxious and in need of a project to calm her nerves—book inventory to do. There’s a few boxes of donations sitting in the back that she could sift through and price out, maybe with some of her less customer-pleasing music on the speakers and a glass of the “emergency” bourbon Kevin keeps in the back.

A rattle of the handle alerts her to the fact she forgot to lock the door and that’s really the sign that Betty isn’t in her right mind today. There’s not the soft chime of the bell on the door signaling a customer who thinks she’s still open; it’s a crash and muted ding and the force of the noise sends Betty skittering backward, reaching for any of her weapons. Her keys and mace are in her bag in the back, her knife left there as well from opening a delivery. She’s never once felt the need to carry them close to her in the store, not here in her safe haven.

The man in the door looks furious in a confused sort of way, like he can’t quite tell what to be angry about. From the worn leather jacket on his shoulders and the helmet held loosely at his side, Betty knows he’s one of the motorcycle riders from before. His frustration is cut by shockingly blue eyes, sharp cheekbones, and a mop of dark hair flopping in all directions.

Betty's hand lands on, of all things, the anthology she'd been using to flatten out her tea-drenched notebook from earlier. She supposes with the right amount of force it might stun him enough for her to get out.

They're both frozen in place, though, neither of them moving in defense or aggression. Her clenched fingers loosen slightly on the thick spine of the book, confusion of her own allowing her guard to drop.

The man speaks finally, but it's with a world weary sigh when he opens his mouth.  “What the fuck happened to the Wyrm?”

 

.

.

.

 

_tbc_


	2. orpheus

_because you didn't know the truth, that's how it works  
_ _'til the bottom drops out and you learn  
_ _we're all just hunters seeking solid ground_  
“orpheus,” sara bareilles

 

* * *

 

 

His dad looks sheepish. It’s an unfamiliar sight, Jughead only ever having seen one of three moods of his father’s: angry, cocky, or drunk. This is new. Different. Jughead is, for the first time since leaving his home two years prior, beginning to realize that the town kept on living while he was gone. He’s changed, he knows this. But Riverdale, the one constant in his life, has changed too.

“So, let me get this straight,” Jughead seethes. “You let Penny _run me out of town_ to make the peace, but failed to mention as I was leaving my home that the other part of this deal was you literally closing up shop on the Serpents? And then you sell the fucking Wyrm to librarian Barbie to sell artisan tea out of the damn place?”

From the other side of the garage—the Serpents’ apparently new and legitimate business practice—Fangs makes a noise of protest. “Come on, Jug, don’t drag Betty into this. She’s really sweet and she doesn’t kno—”

“Can it, Fangs.” Even after all this time, Jughead’s bark can still inspire a blanche of fear in his friend. They may have grown up together, the Serpents may apparently have disbanded, but Jughead was always looked at as a leader for the younger Serpents, the next in line. They listened to him, without question. The small thrill it gives him is bittersweet; he wants to make up for lost time with Fangs, but once a leader, always a leader, he supposes. It’s not unlike the reaction of the woman back at the Wyrm, whose apprehension and terror was written so plainly across her face that Jughead almost didn’t know what to do with himself. It had been so long since anybody reacted to him like that, like he was a real, viable threat; not since Penny, not since leaving town, not since he spent hours upon hours gritting his teeth behind a sticky bar and serving drinks with a tight-lipped smile just to get by.

He hadn’t exactly hung around for a chat, but now Jughead knows her name is Betty. The woman who’s upended his homecoming is named like a 50s housewife, because of course she is.

“Boy! _You_ can it,” FP cuts in. Gone is the sheepishness, and back are all three of the moods at once. There’s a half-empty beer bottle in his father’s hand that Jughead is torn between wanting to chug for himself or smash against the wall. “That was the agreement for our rival not killing you and your buddies on the spot, remember?”

Jughead does remember. The memory is the one haunting his dreams, but with a slightly different ending. His subconscious, ever his worst enemy, concocts the more likely series of events, the one where his father hadn’t shown up and shot Penny clean through the shoulder while she still held the gun to his forehead. Where the ensuing gunfight never happened, and Sweet Pea got a bullet to the temple instead of his thigh. Where Toni’s world ended both with a whimper and a bang. Where Jughead lives an excruciating, endless dream reality of knowing his own idiocy cost his friends their lives.

On his worst days, Jughead wishes that had happened, that they were all dead and the whole ordeal was done with.

If he weren’t so childishly excited to be home, however changed his home may be, Jughead might be wishing that now. Instead, like a child, he’s being lectured by his father.

“That’s right, boy. You thought your sorry ass leaving town was the only thing that would get Penny and her Ghoulie shitheads out of our backyard? Out of where all our families were still in danger? I thought you were supposed to be the smart one in the family, Jug.”

Contempt seeps through every pore but Jughead can’t bring himself to do anything about it.

His dad’s right. He was a fucking idiot. The crushing sense of defeat overwhelms him to the point where he slumps against the same beat-up station wagon Fangs is leaning on. Fangs reaches into the cooler at their feet and hands Jughead a bottle of beer, popping the cap off. The bottle had been shaken a bit too much and foam pours over the neck, runs over Jughead’s thumb and forefinger. He doesn’t move.

“Yeah. That’s what I thought. So, yeah, the Wyrm is gone. You packed up and left, I packed it in. Most of the Serpents left for greener pastures after that. Either to run their own shit or to follow Penny, who knows. Fangs and I and a few others pooled our resources and bought this place. Might not be the Whyte Wyrm, might not the world you thought you were coming back to, but at least we’re making a living for ourselves. At least your kid sister’s still alive and Fangs’ mom got her cancer treatments and there are no more gunfights on graduation days. No thanks to you.”   

FP tosses back the rest of his beer then lets the bottle clatter to the ground. The sound echoes through the large space, making Jughead flinch. He’s expecting a cuff on the back of his head, maybe a hard shoulder that sends him tumbling over the hood of the car. Instead it’s a clap on the shoulder.

“It’s good to see ya, kid. Trailer’s still in the same spot. Jelly took your room, so have fun fighting a teenage girl for that. Don’t come home shitfaced. Or bring any guests with you.”

Jughead feels his face heat up, the whiplash of the conversation throwing him.

He shifts uncomfortably in his jacket, now hyper aware of its meaning, or—now, its lack thereof. Swallowing a long pull of the beer, he turns to Fangs, who’s looking at him curiously.

“So where the hell are we supposed to drink?”

 

 

As it turns out, the only worthwhile “bar” left in Riverdale in the Whyte Wyrm’s absence is in the back room of his father’s new _endeavor_ , which is stocked with surprisingly good beer and liquor for someone who used to keep his son’s lunch money to buy PBR tallboys from the corner store.

They down few drinks each to ease the tension and they’re in a relatively uneasy silence for some time. Eventually, Fangs eyes Jughead with some wariness and clears his throat. “I didn’t tell Toni or SP about the Wyrm either, for what it’s worth, Jug. It,” he swallows a few times, as though collecting his thoughts. “It just never seemed like the right time to bring it up. That was our _place_ and it sucked to see it go, especially when all you guys had gone and I felt like I needed to mourn my whole life as I knew it.”

Boy, does Jughead know the feeling. And now he gets to do it all over it again. This was not the homecoming he’d anticipated; he figured he’d at least get some sort of welcome wagon, if not a full red carpet treatment. In retrospect, given how he’d left and apparently how things had devolved further since then, Jughead supposes he’s lucky to have not been punched in the face.

If anything, it’s a wonder Fangs was willing to give him the all-clear to return. Especially given the undeserved reaming out Jughead had given Fangs for _tattling—_ as though him going to FP hadn’t saved all of their lives. 

Jughead sighs. “It’s not on you, man. I’ll get my head out of my ass eventually and get over it. I’m just happy to be back home, Wyrm or no Wyrm.”

“I’ll drink to that.” Fangs tips the neck of his bottle out for a cheers. “I’ll tell the other two to come by?”

“Nah, don’t bother, I’m beat. I’ll head back to my dad’s and we can all get together tomorrow?”

They do the awkward bro hug and Jughead leaves his friend behind to lock up the garage. It’s odd to see one of his childhood best friends, a brother in more than blood or name, after so much time has passed; he’s grown alongside Sweet Pea and Toni over the long months of their exile, and they’ve seen each other through thick and thin, but Fangs may as well be a stranger to him, to them. They had been drifting away from each other before being shipped out of town, too, Fangs balking at the idea of dealing harder shit and unwilling to stick his neck out that far. At the time, Jughead thought less of Fangs for being too chickenshit, blind to the opportunity. Now, Jughead knows his friend had been the only one seeing the situation clearly.

As much as it may sting Jughead to see Fangs slide into place as FP’s right hand, holding a position that Jughead spent his whole life preparing for, he can’t imagine what it must have been like for Fangs to lose his own childhood friends and be left with only a fucked up father figure and no way to support himself. But Fangs had always been the one with his head screwed on straight, pushing for all of them to show up to enough school to still earn diplomas, shepherding their drunk asses home from the Wyrm night after night. _He’s_ the one who deserves the stability of leadership.

“It’s good to have you back, Jug,” Fangs calls out after him.

Jughead swallows the lump in his throat and starts walking down the path to Sunnyside Trailer Park, feeling the soft glow from his few beers. Briefly, he wonders if this is what his father’s nights are like now—buzzed but not drunk, walking home from a legitimate business to guaranteed safety. It’s certainly not the FP that Jughead grew up with and he’d be more bitter if this change didn’t also mean his sister is guaranteed safety as well.

Another element of Riverdale that’s different: Jellybean is back. There had been no mention of their mother being around, which doesn’t surprise Jughead in the slightest, only in that she likely had to show her face in town in order to bring Jelly back. Gladys Jones had always been flighty at best, a complete flight risk as worst, and there hadn’t been much warning or explanation when she skipped town to her parents with a then-ten-year-old Jellybean in tow. Though Jughead always suspected it had something to do her newly-sixteen, newly-gang-initiated son officially being deemed a worse babysitter than the mother who had tossed her out the door at seventeen, telling her to come home not pregnant or to not bother coming home at all.

Jughead only saw Jelly twice after that, two Christmases in a row, before the Serpent responsibilities really kicked into gear and he decided against going to Miami for that third year. Two years after that, Jughead spent Christmas keeping his and Sweet Pea’s respective bullet wounds uninfected.

He wonders when in the last two years she might have come home—whether it was her own choice, or just Gladys making arbitrary decisions again.

The late hour and the large KEEP OUT scrawled atop a printout of an Alanis Morrisette album taped to his former bedroom door are the things that keep Jughead from waking up his sister to find out the answer to his question. For all he knows, she could hate him, and that fear alone keeps him awake until nearly 5am, staring at the speckled ceiling and reacquainting himself with the sounds of Sunnyside.

 

 

* * *

 

 

**_No tea???_ **

The morning’s text message from JB comes in with several exaggerated crying emojis and Betty panics momentarily that she’s overslept, won’t be able to open the store on time, and then the prior evening’s events slam back into her with the force of a mack truck.

The man bursting through the door, Betty’s paralyzing fear, his insane question before turning on his heel and slamming the door behind so hard that several glass panes shattered, her consequent panic attack that had her rocking on the floor behind the sales counter for nearly an hour before she could breathe clearly enough to call Cheryl.

“Someone—in the store—call Keller please. _Help,_ Cher.”

There had been the knowing looks exchanged between Sheriff Keller, Kevin, and Cheryl that Betty didn’t have the brainpower to dwell on in the moments while Cheryl was wrapping her in a coat and one of the deputies taped cardboard into the empty door panes. Kevin had muttered something to Cheryl about… snakes, maybe, but Betty couldn’t be sure and it was only a matter of time before she was being ushered into Cheryl’s bedroom and falling into a blissful, benzo-fueled sleep.

A gentle throat clearing breaks the silence, pausing Betty’s rapid fire recollection. Cheryl is perched on her chaise lounge, sipping what Betty hopes is water out of a crystal class.

“Morning, sunshine,” she says, not unkindly.

Still hazy from sleep, Betty stifles as yawn. “My alarm didn’t go off, I need to go open the store.”

“Oh, no you don’t,” Cheryl warns as Betty moves to get out of bed. “You can survive one day off. I know you love that store like a child, Betty, but the town will not collapse if they can’t browse used books on a Thursday afternoon. Kevin is over there cleaning up and taking care of the door. And you are under my strict orders to stay in the goddamn bed.”

Betty huffs petulantly, but relents. Her own mind may be stubborn as a mule, constantly at battle with itself, but Cheryl’s insistence knows no bounds. If Cheryl is asking Betty to relax for a day then Cheryl is going to get her cousin to relax, even if it’s by way of forcing espresso, brunch, and an at-home spa treatment upon her.

She can’t deny that the facial is a nice treat, though.

“Cher?” Betty lifts one of the cooling gel packs from her eyes, squinting to where Cheryl is resting on the other side of the bed. She can see the tense swallow move down Cheryl’s throat, as though sensing what Betty is about to ask. When she answers, her voice is carefully neutral, but Betty sees right through it.

“Yes, cousin? Should I call Annaliese back to check on your mask?”

“No, the mask is fine Cheryl. I wanted to ask about last night. Has—has Sheriff Keller caught any leads on who that man was? I know it wasn’t technically a break in, but…” Betty trails off, choking somewhat on her own voice. It’s a technicality, a stupid mistake that she made, that she hasn’t made in _years,_ not since the first time an angry man burst into her home. The man last night hadn’t worn a hood and hadn’t hissed threats into her ear with a gloved hand at her throat, but the shock in her body had been the exact same. It’s certainly the same paralysis and aftershock of anxiety rippling down her spine.

“Ah, yes, well…” Cheryl starts delicately, peeling the covers from her own eyes and facing Betty, clearly having known the entire time that Betty was already looking at her. “Here’s the thing, Betty. Sheriff Keller, useless as he may ordinarily be, already knows who it was. We all do, quite frankly.”

This catches Betty by surprise. “What do you mean you already know who it was?”

“I mean that there’s quite a few dirty little Riverdale secrets you missed out on before moving here. Most of them aren’t mine to tell, and I wouldn’t even have all the right details to share if they were. But it’s safe to say that we’ll all be seeing a lot more of your visitor from last night.”

Betty hands tense instinctively and she has to make the conscious effort to flex them so her palms stay flat. She can feel Cheryl’s eyes tracking her movements, shame and embarrassment flooding through her. It’s something they’ve never discussed, but Betty knows Cheryl is the one who keeps the first aid supplies restocked in the bathroom. Betty has never had anyone in her life who loves her quite like Cheryl does, which is why she can forgive the ensuing tut of, “I’ll have Annaliese break out the mani-pedi supplies. Your cuticles are a travesty.”

 

 

By hour eight of being left alone with Cheryl, Betty is both at her most relaxed and her most on edge. Between the facials and the nail treatments and the sushi delivered from Betty’s favorite place in Greendale and the marathon of rom-coms, she’s living her dream day off. But she can also tell that Cheryl is trying exceptionally hard—too hard—to keep her busy and something about it is beginning to irk her.

After the fourth time that Betty sees Cheryl’s phone light up with a text from a group message with Kevin and Fangs, only for Cheryl to quickly cover the screen and poorly pretend she’s not texting behind the bowl of gourmet popcorn, she’s over it.

“Cher, how are you _this_ bad at being stealthy?” Betty arches her freshly done eyebrows and stares pointedly to where Cheryl has shoved her phone in the armchair cushion. “You’ve barely paid any attention to the movie and I know Julia Stiles is your favorite, so what gives?” When Cheryl puts on a defensive air and opens her mouth to speak, Betty cuts her off. “Don’t even think about making something up, I know you and Kevin and Fangs are talking about whoever that man in the store last night was. Save it and pony up.”

Pursing her lips, Cheryl heaves a sigh. “With your bullshit detector, you really could have made it big with journalism, B. Your mother, god help us both, would be proud.” At that, Betty tosses a decorative, beaded pillow at Cheryl’s face, which she deftly avoids. “Like I said, it’s not my place to tell you most of what’s going on. Or, I should say, what went on in the past. I grew up here, yes, but my parents shipped me off to boarding school so I really did miss a lot of the finer details of the original Riverdale chaos. So it’s a conversation best suited for Kevin and Fangs to lead.” There’s a glint in her eye when she continues, “Though they’ve shared a few choice pieces via text and I thought _my_ youth in an all-girls school was salacious.”

It’s not a satisfying answer and the sour look on her face must be very apparent to her cousin.

“I swear on the butterfly clips in 90s-era Julia Stiles’ hairdo that I am not keeping things from you in an effort to protect you, Betty. Even if it’s coming across that way. I learned two years ago that you are more than capable of handling your own shit and I wouldn’t pretend otherwise. You’re going to get the best explanation of all of this from the people who lived it.”

She can’t help but be proud of her cousin who once at Christmas, back when Betty was in high school, tried to pay her to unwrap and rewrap a present from her parents because Cheryl ‘wanted to be sure mother and father bought me the _right_ diamond earrings.’ Cheryl has come a long way since being a permanent fixture in Betty’s life.

“If you think this means anything other than me ambushing Kev first thing in the morning, Cher, you don’t know me at all.”

With a roll of her eyes, Cheryl focuses her attention back on the movie. “I’d expect nothing less.”

Neither did Kevin and Fangs, who are both in Mysterious Letters when Betty comes in the next morning, ostensibly waiting for her, but more interested in each other’s mouths than in explaining things to her.

The pair has been together for longer than Betty’s known them, but Kevin and Fangs are still nauseatingly cute in public. They make quite the oddball pair with Kevin’s overall preppy demeanor and propensity to burst into song matched against Fangs’ strong and silent vibes, earring, and leather pants, but Betty has never seen a more fitting couple. (Except for Archie and Veronica perhaps, a match made in heaven since the sophomore homecoming dance, but Betty chokes that thought down.) Much as she doesn’t _love_ seeing more of Kevin’s tongue than is strictly necessary for a friend and coworker, Betty has the impression that they each had their own difficulties in coming out, even more so in finding their first serious relationship, so Betty can’t begrudge them their happiness.

That being said—

“Ahem,” Betty coughs pointedly.

Fangs has the good grace to look a little embarrassed, but Kevin springs up and starts talking like nothing was out of the ordinary. “You look so pampered, Betty! Did Cheryl have to literally strap you down to stop you from leaving yesterday?”

Betty Cooper, nothing if not predictable. Especially to the friends she’s made in her post-Black Hood world of excessive caution and strict routines.

She doesn’t have the chance to answer and she’s grateful that Kevin keeps babbling. “So we got the door panes fixed and my dad offered to get the locks changed if you want, even though nothing is busted. There’s also the option to get an alarm system. Which again, there’s not exactly a _threat_ because it’s not a, uh, well okay so—”

“Kev, breathe,” Fangs says, coming up behind his boyfriend. He turns to Betty, “He was nervous and drank too much coffee so we’re running at peak Kevin energy right now.”

Kevin makes a face but then nods in agreement. “This is more of a seated conversation. Let’s get you some tea? Coffee? I can go get you a donut from Pop’s?”

Something about both their nervous energy over whatever it is they’re trying to tell her is setting Betty’s teeth on edge. “ _Guys,_ just spit it out already.”   

Mercifully, Fangs takes the direction well. He clears his throat a few times before speaking again, as though using the time to steady himself for the upcoming story. “You know how you always make Fight Club jokes about how I know gloves-off boxing so well?” Betty nods, drumming her fingers on the counter and now seriously considering Kevin’s donut offer. This isn’t quite where she expected this to go. “Well, it was less of a fight club and more of an ...actual gang.” Her heartbeat stutters in confusion, but Betty keeps her face neutral and nods in encouragement for Fangs to keep going. “A lot of us were, actually. Most of the crew from mine and FP’s shop. FP was in charge. The Serpents were around for as long as the Southside itself was, our own kind of family for the rejects and orphans and anybody who needed a support system. Or at least that’s how they sold it to us when we were all fourteen and too stupid to realize that this kind of family came with a price. A contract, if you will. You join, you get the shit kicked out of you, you get this family that takes care of you. And when you’re old enough to pull shit off, you do runs. Petty theft, car chops, selling weed to Northsiders. All the things that put FP and the elders in the position to support the kids whose parents were in jail or had fucked off.

“I’m not proud of it, but it’s how we survived. I did the bare minimum to keep my jacket and my protection, but some of the other kids in my quote-unquote initiation class thought we could do more with a bigger payout, maybe get enough to get us all out of this shitty vicious cycle. It, uh, spiraled and my buddies crossed paths with a Montreal gang and we all nearly got killed over it. I was the one who ratted them out to FP and he showed up just in time to watch Penny and the Ghoulies nearly put bullets in their heads. The deal was that the Ghoulies would spare them if FP closed up shop and sent my idiot friends out of town. And he did,” Fangs scrubs a hand over his face. “I almost watched my best friends die and lost my entire livelihood in one night. But FP agreed and was pretty ruthless about sending them packing. Toni, Sweet Pea, and Jughead. He didn’t even blink about exiling his own son.”

Among all of the new information thrown at her, Betty picks up on _FP’s son_ first. “Wait, so JB has a brother? Who you were in _a gang with?_ And nearly got you all killed?”

Sighing, Fangs nods. “He, uh, he’s the one who paid you a visit last night. The store used to be a bar before, and it was our de facto headquarters. FP sold it to Cheryl to keep us all afloat right after the Serpents disbanded. I might have forgotten to mention that to Jughead when I told him the FBI rounded up all the Ghoulies and it was safe for them to come home.”

Kevin wasn’t kidding, Betty really should have been sitting down for this. There’s too much cognitive dissonance between Fangs, the guy teaches her self-defense and regularly watches musicals with his boyfriend, and Fangs, the former gang member who is casually tossing around bizarre gang lingo like it’s the most normal thing in the world. What on _earth_ , she wants to know, is a Ghoulie?

(Then again, he is a guy who willingly goes by the name ‘Fangs,’ so maybe Betty shouldn’t be all that shocked.)

“Kev?” she says weakly. “I’ll take that coffee now. But can you add the emergency bourbon to it?”

 

 

* * *

 

 

Eventually, Jughead must fall asleep and fall asleep hard at that, because when he next opens his eyes, it’s to blinding afternoon sun and a sticky note on his forehead telling him that ‘JB’ put the leftover coffee in the fridge for him and that she wants to get Pop’s after school together. His father’s method of communication is a perfunctory text, **_at the garage until closing. bring ur bike for a tune up. don’t blow off jelly for pops pls._ **

If FP Jones, Jr. is telling _him_ not to flake on his little sister, then Jughead really has woken up in the twilight zone. Being in the trailer again feels like he’s in the bizarro-version of his old life; it’s the same sagging plaid couch he grew up with, but it’s facing a television from this decade; the front door actually _latches_ all the way and apparently locks, too, if the key left out on the same old formica table is any indication; the fridge still looks like it’s straight out of the 1950s, but it’s stocked with vegetables and the carton of milk doesn’t expire until six days from now; winter may be on its way out, but the heater is on and working without an ominous rattle.

Looking around is like playing an extended game of two truths and a lie—there’s things that teenage Jughead would never have believed until he’d seen it with his own eyes, but then something remains unchanged to ground him in the new reality.  

Pop’s Chock’lit Shoppe is as it always was, which comes as a huge relief to Jughead. Pop Tate himself greets him with a grin and a chocolate shake on the house, and Jughead demolishes a double cheeseburger before JB even shows up. At first he feels guilty that he didn’t wait for her, but his desire to eat a burger that doesn’t taste like garbage wins out. He makes it up by ordering fresh fries and onion rings when he sees school-age kids start to trickle in.

(Somewhere in the depths of his brain, he remembers two things: Jellybean loves strawberry shakes and Riverdale High lets out at 2:42pm. He hopes to god neither thing has changed.)

Understandably, Jughead barely recognizes his sister when she walks into the diner—he hasn’t seen her in years after all, long enough for him to not know she prefers a new nickname—but the dark hair and trademark Jones scowl catches his eye from the window. There are streaks of purple in her French braid and her backpack is clearly sturdy but still covered in patches and safety-pins, and something in his gut twists when he sees a Basquiat crown drawn in silver marker on one shoulder strap.

It’s the strap that she barely hangs onto when she sees him from the doorway and breaks into a sprint to hug him. The embrace is so strong it nearly topples Jughead back into the booth. She’s tall and a stringbean, just like he was, but packs some punch behind her thin frame.

“Holy _shit_ I can’t believe you’re back, Jug,” she half-mumbles, half-yells into his jacket.

Jughead suddenly finds his eyes wet with tears and has a weak instinct to chastise his little sister for swearing, but can’t be bothered. “I can’t believe _you’re_ back, when did that happen?”

It takes a few moments for her to lessen the stranglehold on his neck and plop into the booth across from him. He can’t stop looking at her, he finds. It’s been so long since they could be together without Gladys hovering and all Jughead wants is to catalog the details in order to better understand who his sister is now. Her nails are neatly polished in a strawberry pink, matching the shake she wraps her hand around, but her hands are covered in pen-drawn doodles and she has a nose ring that Gladys must fucking hate.

“I dunno,” she answers, extending her legs to rest Converse-clad feet next to where he sits. Also covered in pen doodles. “Two-ish years now? Dad asked Mom if I could come for Christmas right around when you left and she said yes, dropped me off with some of my shit, and then just didn’t pick me back up for New Year’s. Been here ever since.”

She is so nonchalant about it that Jughead just blinks. He had certainly not been so blasé when _he_ had been the one abandoned by their mother.

“It’s cool, Jug, I honestly like living with Dad. He’s like a tall, grumpy teddy bear. Not at all like I remember him from when we were kids. Plus the schools are way better here than Miami, people are nicer, summer isn’t as disgustingly hot.”

FP is many, many things, but a teddy bear is not one of them. Not the FP that Jughead knew, anyway. Certainly not the one who broke one of his ribs during initiation and sent him packing without so much as a goodbye two years prior. And Gladys may have left _him_ behind, but it was under the pretense of being a better mother to Jellybean, to get her away from the Serpents. Away from FP and Jughead, to give her a chance at a decent life.

He shakes his head to clear it a little. It’s not the time to harp on his shitty parents, not when he finally has his sister back.

His sister who must sense where his head is going and kicks him, not so gently, in the leg. “You better snap out of or I’m not leaving any fries for you,” she grins. “So what about you, you were camped out in like Ohio or somewhere, right?”

“Toledo,” Jughead answers. “And it fucking sucked.” He starts to tell her about some of the crappiest parts of living in Ohio, but it’s all with a huge smile on his face.

 

 

When he’s sitting in a corner booth at Pop’s the next day, with a pen in hand and bottomless coffee refills, Jughead feels transported back in time. He’s eleven, twelve, sipping his first tastes of black coffee and waiting for his dad or Fangs’ mom or Toni’s uncle to take him back to Sunnyside; fifteen and doodling Serpent insignia on napkins, deciding on which design he wants for his tattoo; nineteen, nursing a hangover, and plotting to really earn his stripes as his own person—not just as FP’s son—by bringing in new business, more money; nineteen again, joined by two of his best friends, realizing they might be in over their heads.

And now: twenty-two, reacclimating to his hometown. Trying to figure out what the hell to do now.

Every moment of his life had been about getting to the next one. Get older, grow taller, join the Serpents, make more money, survive the Ghoulies, get back home. And now he’s reached the end of the list, he’s come home and there’s no next step. His plan had been to return to the Serpents, reintegrate, learn the ropes, take over for FP. It’s all shot to smithereens—maybe for the best, the small JB-like voice in his head needles—and Jughead has no fucking clue what comes next.

Does he get a job, learn to fix cars? Go to school? Sleep on his dad’s couch in Sunnyside until the whole damn trailer just dissolves into the ground?

The front door opens and Jughead looks up, more for something to pay attention to than anything else. He’s dumbfounded for a few seconds as the woman from the not-Wyrm walks in. _Betty,_ Fangs had said. Undoubtedly the same Betty that’s tutoring his sister for college applications, one of the many pieces of information JB has shot at him, rapid-fire, in the past 24 hours. Blonde and ponytailed and wrapped in a heavy winter coat that seems to swallow her, especially since the weather is now just enough on the side of not-freezing to merit something lighter, chatting animatedly with the waitress at the counter and bearing no physical evidence that Jughead had scared the shit out of her two days prior.

He knows that at some point, he needs to seek her out to apologize. Even get to know her, if she’s as much a fixture in town as it sounds like she is. It’s not like _she_ closed down the Wyrm on purpose and bought it from his dad. She isn’t the one to blame for the Serpents losing their livelihood and their home base in one fell swoop.

(No, Jughead thinks. That one is all on him.)

Even so, her and her stupid store are the perfect reminder of everything that changed about Jughead’s life since the day he left home. It sets his teeth on edge that she’s the one who spends every day in that building and that she’s made a life among the wreckage of his own.

_Fuck her_ , he thinks bitterly, surprising himself with the amount of venom in his thoughts. _Who is she to have swanned into Riverdale like it’s her own hometown?_

She’s probably perfectly nice. She’s even continuing her conversation with the waitress, though her order is ready and clasped in her hand and she’d fidgeting like she desperately wants to end the chitchat. But she nods along, nice and sweet and sipping on a vanilla milkshake to go with her glossy blonde ponytail. From halfway across the diner, Jughead can tell that she’s wearing dark pink lipstick; there’s a lip print on the end of her milkshake straw. The whole thing is so damn picturesque that he could scream.

And then, in the beat it takes for Jughead to close his eyes and calm his irrationalities, she’s gone. The waitress ducks back into the kitchen and the door rattles on its hinges.

He catches sight of Betty again through the window, walking quickly against the chill in the air but still taking sips from her shake. That, at least, he can admire. No one can resist a Pop’s milkshake. She rounds the corner heading back to Main Street, back to the store that isn’t the Whyte Wyrm, back to the world that he’s barely starting to understand.

 

 

* * *

 

 

Betty has had a weird 48 hours. There’s no way around it. After Kevin brings her the coffee (and bourbon), the trio sits in relative silence on the couches at the front window of Mysterious Letters.

“Do you want to ask me anything else?” Fangs suggests.

She thinks about it and decides that, no, there’s not much more information she can process at this exact moment and tells him so. He nods and they continue to drink coffee. Eventually Fangs leaves for the garage, kissing Kevin goodbye and squeezing Betty on the shoulder. Kevin gets up to take care of things behind the counter, tossing worried glances in her direction every so often while she sips the coffee and stares at the new pane of glass in the front door.

“So,” she starts, breaking the silence so abruptly that Kevin gives a noise of surprise. “ _Everyone_ knew this place used to be a gang bar?”

“Pretty much.”

“Huh.” More coffee. Betty pours herself a fresh cup and a fresh splash of bourbon. “And everyone knew FP used to run the gang? And kicked his own son out of town for getting them in trouble with a rival gang?”

“Yup.”

“ _Everyone?”_

“Yes, Betty,” Kevin says. “Just about everyone in town knows about the Serpents. The dust was just settling from Jughead’s fuckup when you moved here and I think everyone, FP and Fangs especially, was trying to move on from it so… they did.”

She can appreciate that.

“This is a weird town,” Betty mutters. “There is _literally_ a returned prodigal son.”

Kevin laughs, a customer comes through the door, and the day carries on. But all afternoon, Betty can’t stop thinking about it. Particularly about how she’s going to have to meet this prodigal son. Spend _time_ with him.

There’s no avoiding this, Betty tells herself. She owns a—fairly popular, if she may say so—business in town. She tutors his sister. She is close friends with one of his lifelong friends. There is simply no way that she can avoid Jughead Jones, much as she might want to.

How could this acquaintanceship even go? _Hi, I’ve lived here for two years and have heard nothing about you because you were apparently in hiding from a rival gang leader and now you’re back and you hate me on principle for stealing your bar, oh and you kicked off my PTSD by barging in the door of my business looking murderous._

Betty spends much of the afternoon grumbling to herself about the inevitable introduction, repeatedly typing and then deleting texts to both Cheryl and Kevin for advice, flinching any time a man walks past the storefront, and generally being too on edge to function. She treats herself to Pop's for lunch, savoring the shake on the way back to Main Street until she passes a motorcycle in the parking lot and her stomach turns. Kevin dutifully eats her untouched grilled cheese and fries. Fridays are usually her favorite days, too. She closes up early to let Dilton Doiley, a science teacher at Riverdale Middle School, run his Gryphons & Gargoyle quests out of the shop—a sweet setup facilitated by Kevin, who only dabbles in the game but was sick of hosting at his apartment, that lets Betty close without losing money—and has her tutoring session with JB, though the Friday sessions often devolve into hanging out at Pop’s and not doing much SAT prep.

But now Betty has to face JB, a girl she sees so much of herself in but who has the capacity to be stronger than Betty ever was, to do really great things, and try to pretend that she doesn’t know about her no-longer-estranged, former-gangbanger brother. And it’s not the gang part, truly, though Betty knows that will be both JB’s and Jughead’s assumption when she isn’t chomping at the bit to spend any amount of time around him. She doesn’t think any less of Fangs than she did before knowing about his Serpent involvement, it’s merely a new lens to look at him through; he’s still one of her closest friends. It was something about the air of entitlement he’d had when barging into Mysterious Letters and the way he didn’t appear to acknowledge or care that his anger might affect others—affect _her._ The ensuing panic attack hadn’t explicitly been Jughead’s fault, but Betty doesn’t like the idea of being around someone so casual with explosive emotions.

(Not to mention that he broke her front door.)  

And then, as though she conjured them with her thoughts, JB and Jughead are outside said door, looking annoyed with each other. To see them next to each other, their likeness is startling. They have the same complexion and dark, enviable hair, the same jawline, and currently, the same expression of frustration. The expression morphs differently for each of them when they realize they have Betty as an audience; JB grins and waves, moving to open the door, while Jughead’s features fall into a purposely neutral set, though his jaw is visibly clenched.

“Betty!” cries JB. “You weren’t here yesterday and then I overslept this morning, so I didn’t get to tell you! My brother is back in town, this is Jughead.” She gestures to him over her shoulder and the smile on her face is so wide that Betty can’t help but smile in return. JB is a great kid who deserves the world, and if she is this excited to have her brother around, maybe Betty can make the effort to get to know him. For JB’s sake.

Behind her, Jughead’s neutrality is slipping into a slight scowl. Her goodwill dissipates.

Betty levels him with a glare, the fury in her stomach settling down to something smaller, more palatable. In response, he looks somewhat apologetic, but there’s a glint of smugness behind his eyes that she doesn’t like. (Even if it is the exact look JB often gives her when Betty makes an empty threats during their tutoring sessions of no Pop’s or no morning tea unless she pays attention.) Like he thinks he has her pegged, just the quiet bookshop owner who his little sister looks up to.

So, sweet as saccharin, she responds to JB while maintaining eye contact with him, “Oh, we’ve met already, JB! And I have a repair bill from Mr. Svenson that has your name _all_ over it, Jughead.”

 

.

.

.

 

_tbc_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> as always, please let me know what you think!  
> and as always, an endless thank you to my lovely beta iconic-ponytail and my lovely cheerleaders, jugandbettsdetectiveagency & canariesrise ❤️


	3. dearly departed

_well  
_ _you and I both know that the house is haunted  
_ _and you and I both know that the ghost is me  
_ “dearly departed,” shakey graves 

 

* * *

 

Betty has to admit, it’s satisfying to see Jughead eat his words, even ones he hadn’t spoken yet. JB glances between them, looking bewildered and a little uneasy. 

“Jug, what’s she talking about?” 

Another flash of guilt crosses his eyes and Betty’s stomach drops a little, feeling her own guilt for potentially ruining what JB expected to be a positive, exciting moment. If there’s anything Betty wants in this world, it’s for the young woman she’s taken under her wing to never experience the hurt that Betty has in her own life. 

Her voice catches when she speaks again. The look she and Jughead share as she speaks confirms that they feel the same fierce protection for JB. “You know what, it doesn’t matter, JB. Do you still want to study today, or do you want to skip to hang out with your brother?” 

JB still looks caught off guard. “I figured Jug might like poking around the store while we work, since he’s such a fucking bookworm, too.” Beside her, Jughead stares determinedly at his shoes which look scuffed in grease. Betty wonders if he’s been hanging out at the garage with FP and Fangs, if he’s reconciling for his past. Or maybe she’s just projecting. 

Either way, she’d prefer him to look her in the eye at least once. “Sure, come on in.” 

Betty knows that JB knows something is up, her eyes shrewd, but it’s clear that Jughead is also willing to sweep their initial meeting under the rug in JB’s presence so Betty moves out of the entryway to let them come in further. 

“Don’t forget that Dilton has game night tonight, though, so we’ll have to work in the office.” 

JB snorts and turns to her brother. “If you feel like reliving your middle school glory days, there’s a G&G campaign starting in about twenty minutes.” Betty thinks she sees Jughead’s eyes spark in interest for half a moment before the scowl returns. “Betty, can I move the good chairs into the back for us?” 

Before Betty can nod in assent, JB starts dragging one of the armchairs out of the main sitting area. Now there’s at least an opportunity to force Jughead to acknowledge her. 

“I wasn’t kidding about the repair bill, for the record.” 

Jughead nervously looks toward JB, now halfway across the store, and hisses back in a low voice. “Do we have to do this right now? I’d prefer JB not to know about it since I don’t think she’ll take kindly to me pissing off her favorite tutor before I’d been home for an hour.” 

“Well I’d prefer that you hadn’t busted my shop’s front door, but we can’t all have the things we want.”  

The scowl turns into a full glower. “Excuse me for not caring about something as trivial as a broken window, _Betty_. I’m a little more focused on catching up with my family.” 

The way that he snarks on her name sets Betty’s teeth on edge and she’s tempted to raise her voice to fully give him a piece of her mind, JB’s attendance be damned. The distinct sound of the chair knocking into a wall and a loud _ow, shit_ from the teenager in question _,_ keeps Betty in line. “Well,” she says serenely. “If family time is what you’re after, you are more than welcome to come work on JB’s essay on _Hamlet_ with us.” 

His glowering intensifies, jaw set hard, but he says nothing. Betty two, Jughead zero. 

“Your loss, you could see first hand how smart she’s grown up to be.” Though Betty didn’t initially intend any malice with her comment, in retrospect it could be read as a very pointed remark toward Jughead’s irresponsibility and consequent need to abandon his family. It’s very clear from the moment she finishes speaking that this is _exactly_ how Jughead takes it. Before she even has the chance to open her mouth and clarify her intent, Jughead turns on his heel and stomps away from her. 

He pulls the door shut behind him, not quite a slam but not without force. 

 

 

Usually when she returns home, Betty takes time to decompress by herself in the guest house before sitting with Cheryl. Tonight, she barrels through the door straight from the driveway after parking her car. 

“Cheryl,” she calls out from the mudroom, kicking off her shoes. “I need wine!” 

“Way ahead of you, ma cherie.” Cheryl pads across the kitchen from the den, all slippers and silk and well into her evening of relaxation. “I spent the final three hours of my work day arguing with estate lawyers about a Greendale property so I’m extremely over it. What’s up on your end?” 

“Jughead Jones,” Betty grumbles. She accepts the glass Cheryl hands her out of the cabinet and then waits until there’s a more than generous pour to say ‘when.’ “He won’t even apologize for breaking my damn door and he’s so condescending I can’t stand it.” 

Cheryl clucks sympathetically but says nothing, which is unlike her. When Betty raises an eyebrow while sipping the merlot, her cousin opens her mouth, pauses, and then speaks with a dangerously blasé tone. “You know if you've got this big a bee in your bonnet, let's just go see Fangs. You know he'll be posted up in the back bar while Kev is being a mega nerd. And there's only so many places in this town to hang out, so he’s bound to be there too.” 

“I don’t want to _hang out_ with him, Cheryl,” she huffs. “He’s obnoxious and rude and looks at me like I’m dirt on his shoe.” 

She’s met with Cheryl’s own arched brow. “Just saying,” she singsongs. “They’re your friends too, you’re allowed to be territorial if he’s insistent on making this a pissing contest.” 

The prospect of confronting Jughead has Betty gulping down more wine, but she shakes her head. She refuses to give him the satisfaction of starting a fight. But the idea of conveniently running into him at the garage while spending time with _her_ friends—even if they’re also _his—_ is one she files away for later. Later, once she’s had time to carefully craft some rebuttals to his snark. 

Several glasses of wine later, Cheryl is waxing poetic about her need to _break free of the small town confines for some ‘real fun’_ and Betty is still grumbling (to herself, now) about Jughead’s infuriating smugness from before. And, now that she’s had enough wine to admit it to herself, maybe also grumbling about how damn handsome he looks while being a smug asshole. 

Betty is still grumbling the next morning when she opens up Mysterious Letters, over both Jughead’s attitude and her mild hangover, then over the mess that the G&G players left from the night before. Between Kevin and Dilton the group is usually good about cleaning up after themselves, but chairs are scattered everywhere, the card tables aren’t in the storage closet, empty pizza boxes are stacked haphazardly at the back door, the office door is still unlocked. Betty knows she locked the office when she left as the campaign was starting, with JB side-eyeing her, so Kevin definitely used his key. 

“For fuck’s _sake_ , Kev,” she snarls to herself. 

Normally she would be annoyed, but Betty is still so on edge from Jughead’s unceremonious entry into her daily life that she’s much closer to furious than she might be on any other day. There’s no reason she should be doing this herself and in a rare moment of assertion, Betty flips the sign on the door back to closed and slams it behind her. One **_if the store isn’t cleaned up by noon I’m revoking G &G privileges _ ** text to Kevin later, Betty is on her way to Pop’s for a leisurely breakfast of waffles and coffee. Let them be the ones to smooth over _her_ ruffled feathers instead of Betty being the accommodating people-pleaser Alice Cooper raised her to be. Over the years, Betty has managed to undo a lot of the perverse hardwiring of her childhood, but she is still saddled with her innate need to ensure everybody is happy, and especially happy _with her._ A great deal of that hardwiring was forcibly re-wired during the months in Boston where Betty spent every waking moment—which was most moments, given fear-induced insomnia—worried for her safety and sanity, but old habits die hard. 

By the time Betty is digging into the strawberries and cream smothering her waffles (Pop knows her well enough at this point that she didn’t need to finish her order before he offered the extra whipped cream and berries), Kevin has texted a profuse apology and she’s feeling less like she might bite the head off the next person to speak to her. 

That is, until the next person to walk in the door and accidentally meet her eye is none other than Jughead. He was looking relaxed and almost had a semblance of a smile on his face before he saw her and his jaw visibly sets. Tired and frustrated, with a mouthful of waffle, Betty doesn’t bother trying to muster up a glare, but the intention is certainly there. 

She does her best to focus on her breakfast until she hears Jughead talking to Pop as he pours a mug of coffee and he asks about _job openings._ If it wouldn’t give away that she’s eavesdropping, Betty would knock her head against the tabletop. 

Looking longingly at her waffles, Betty resolves to savor every last bite. If Jughead Jones is about to become a new fixture behind the counter at Pop’s, she may have to seriously cut back on visits. 

The next forkful of cream tastes like defeat.   

 

* * *

 

Betty Cooper’s presence at Pop’s is almost enough to make Jughead reconsider his plan of asking Pop for a job. 

Almost. 

But he was here _first,_ dammit, he’s the one who grew up on those burgers and shakes and he’ll be damned if he lets this woman bully him out of the only paying job in town he’s actually qualified for. Which is to say he’s qualified for absolutely nothing except tending bar and there’s no more dive bar to serve at, just that damned bookstore. 

In retrospect, Jughead isn’t sure what he expected in coming home. He assumed there would be enough quasi-above-board Serpent gigs to keep his head above water, maybe a decent amount of tip money at the Wyrm to scrape together tuition for a class or two at Greendale Community. He certainly hadn’t expected _nothing._ Sweet Pea and Toni would be fine; Sweets is good enough with cars to be of use to FP and Fangs at the garage and Toni has such a series of aces up her sleeves in terms of marketable skills that she could probably walk into any business and be hired on the spot. 

(There’s a bougie coffee shop across the block from the former-Wyrm that Jughead knows she’s eyeing. Jughead had considered it as well, but he didn’t have the year of Starbucks experience that Toni does and the idea of staring at the bookstore day in, day out made him nauseous. So: Pop’s it is.)

The person presently ruining his life looks just undignified enough while shoving a bite of waffle into her mouth that Jughead can shake his frustration with her and focus on talking Pop into paying him in cash instead of the free chili fries he’d always gotten for busing tables in high school. By the time they shake on it and Pop disappears into the back office for paperwork, Betty is gone from her booth. Out of deference to the _I’ll start right now_ he’d given to his new employer and certainly not because of curiosity, Jughead starts clearing her table. The cutlery is neatly placed on the dish next to the stacked coffee mug and saucer, one barely used napkin folded under the lip of the saucer. It takes zero effort to remove the remnants of her from the tabletop and something about that drives Jughead up the wall. 

The only evidence that she’s been there is the faint lipstick print of the rim of the mug and her crisp bills tucked beneath the sugar. 

At least she tips well, Jughead snorts to himself. 

 

 

Always a creature of habit, Jughead slips easily into his new routine. He’s up at four a.m. to open for Pop at six, sweats his way through a day behind the counter, inhales his two free burgers after the lunch rush, and goes home to clean up. He’ll shoot the shit at the garage during the afternoon if they’re not busy and then ride his bike around the highways that circle the outskirts of town—usually with a break to smoke a cigarette out of the pack he bought on impulse when he ducked into the corner store to avoid one Miss Betty Cooper when walking down Maple Avenue. That one pack turned into two, which then turned into the sweet buzz of nicotine coursing through his body at any given moment. 

Just one more thing he can be mad at her for.  

There is, to Jughead’s complete shock, something akin to family time every evening. JB and FP had already been in a pattern of switching off nights for who cooked, with takeout thrown in every few days, so Jughead is added to the rotation; FP drinks three beers max in one evening and watches whatever game happens to be on, JB does her homework with her notebooks propped on bent knees while curled up in the sagging armchair and music blasting through her headphones, and Jughead tries to figure out when the hell his life turned into the trailer park version of Norman Rockwell. 

Then he’s usually asleep on the sofa bed by eleven p.m. Rinse and repeat. 

It would be great, albeit very Twilight Zone, if his little sister’s own routine weren’t so entangled with her tutoring sessions with Betty. Monday, Wednesday, Friday he idles at the corner of Main Street, covertly smoking while wearing his anything-but-covert Serpents jacket, and waits for JB to exit Mysterious Letters. Strictly speaking, Jughead doesn’t need to give her a ride home—Riverdale is _safe_ now, after all, not an active gang member in sight—but he likes the idea of making up for lost time in those ten minute increments, and it has the added bonus of convincing JB that he doesn’t hate her favorite person without ever having to _see_ said favorite person. 

Though he suspects that one day, his very perceptive sister will call him on his shit and make him pick her up inside the store. Jughead is hoping to get a few more weeks out of this arrangement. 

He doesn’t get his wish when, a few Thursdays after being home and in this new way of living, he makes the mistake of telling JB at dinner that Pop gave him Friday and Saturday off. 

“Awesome!” she chirps. “So you won’t be too tired tomorrow to come into Betty’s when you pick me up tomorrow. She’s dying to meet you for more than five seconds.” 

That, Jughead thinks, is the biggest lie he’s ever heard. 

But he can appreciate that Betty must also be fibbing for his sister’s benefit. For that, his dislike lessons by a fraction of a degree and he keeps the forced smile on his face for a few beats longer than is needed for the moment and Jughead sees JB’s eyes narrow somewhat. When she announces that she’s going to bed, FP turns his attention away from a hockey game between teams to which he has zero allegiance and fixes Jughead with a look. “What is your deal with Betty, boy?” 

Maybe it’s because beer number three is empty earlier than it usually is, or because Jughead is itching for an argument and is on his own third beer, or simply being called _boy_ when he’s a goddamned adult, but his dad’s question pisses him off. “My _deal_ is that she’s some Northside princess who opened a fancy store with mom and dad’s money and still sees fit to shake down a trailer park family for tutoring money three times a week in the name of the greater good or some bullshit like that. She’s got a stick up her ass and I don’t like that she’s using my kid sister as some pet project to make herself feel like she’s being a good person.” Furious, Jughead downs the last few gulps of his beer before getting up and letting it clatter to the bottom of the trash bin. 

FP’s eyebrows couldn’t be farther up his forehead and Jughead immediately feels chastened for yet another outburst in front of his father. FP doesn’t flinch at his raised voice, doesn’t betray the undercurrent of fear that Jughead always did as a kid when his father would start on one of his drunken rants. The notion that he’s becoming more like his father—a version of his father who barely exists anymore—nauseates him. He never wanted _this_ piece of his father’s legacy, only the power and respect. And now that his own voice is ringing in his ears, Jughead swallows bile when he realizes how his father had held onto that power and respect for so long.  

“The town’s changed, Jug, it’s not so heavy on the classist bullshit anymore. You can keep wearing that jacket all you like and act like the big man on campus, but there’s no student body around to listen to you beat your chest.” 

Jughead is already in the middle of zipping up said jacket, boots slipped on and key in hand, and his stomach threatens to revolt at his father’s words. 

“Your sister was failing English before Betty came along last year. The teacher recommended her and Betty’s been helping JB ever since, free of charge. Hate her all you want, but she’s a good person and your sister deserves some semblance of a responsible mother figure in her life.” FP shrugs and swigs at his beer again before turning back to the TV. There’s a not so silent _so shut the fuck up_ tacked on to the end of his speech and Jughead feels his stomach lurch once more. But he’s already up and pissed off, so he marches out the door anyway. 

The beers mean he can’t drive and he figures the fresh air will do him some good anyway, so he calls Fangs to see what he’s doing. The background of the call tells him the whole group is at the garage (“Tell worker bee to come play!” Toni shouts) and he tries to ignore the stab of annoyance that they’re all together without him. It only spurs him to walk faster and he feels dead sober by the time he ducks under the half closed garage door of Southside Motors to cheers and catcalls from his friends. Fangs presses a bottle of beer into his hand and claps him on the shoulder. “Thanks for gracing us with your presence,” he grins. 

Jughead must have a sour look on his face because his friend follows up with a more sincere comment. “For real, Jug. I know you’re working like crazy but it’s good to see you.” 

“And SP is trying to serenade us all, so thank you for giving our bleeding ears a break.” Toni is sitting cross-legged on top of a workbench and tips her can in a cheers. 

Sweet Pea looks up from his perch on the metal stool on the opposite end of the garage. He is, infuriatingly, plucking at random on the guitar that should have mysteriously fallen out of the truck bed if Jughead had had any forethought before leaving Ohio. 

(At least, Jughead thinks, Sweet Pea's abuela is the one suffering through rounds of offkey Wonderwall instead of him and Toni.) 

“Hey, I’ve gotta do something to stand out for the ladies,” Sweet Pea whines. 

Piling on Sweet Pea’s bad luck with women is an easy pivot and Jughead happily joins in, grateful for any topic other than Betty Cooper. “Sweets, every woman in this town has known you your whole life and mediocre guitar skills are not enough to erase anyone’s memory of Jason Blossom pantsing you in the fifth grade.” 

“Au contraire, mon frère,” his friend says, butchering the accent and accompanying it with an out of tune chord. “That Cooper chick that owns the bookstore knows nothing of my grade school underwear choices. I dunno about you, but the librarian Barbie thing kind of works for me. I'd hit it." 

Jughead flushes first and glares at Fangs for sharing the details of his temper tantrum with them, even if it’s now weeks in the past. He then finds himself fighting the strange urge to deck Sweet Pea in the face for objectifying Betty like that. It’s a violent swing in the opposite direction from his usual thoughts on her and catches him somewhat off-guard. 

(It’s just a defensive ‘don’t talk shit about women’ thing, he tells himself. It’s gross and he’d never want a guy talking about JB that way. It’s definitely not about _her,_ or her perfectly curled ponytail.)

Luckily, Fangs and Toni beat him to it, Toni reaching to actually cuff the back of his head and Fangs whipping around to tell him off. “Sweets, you're gonna need to seriously up your musical wooing game if you even think about maybe hitting on her. Betty will wipe the floor with your smug ass.” And, then, though his words are still ostensibly directed at Sweet Pea, Fangs locks eyes with Jughead as he keeps talking. “She has no time, space, or patience for your Serpent-sized ego in her life.”

Sweet Pea makes a noise like _yeesh_ and holds his hands up in surrender. Jughead is suddenly very interested in brand name of the socket wrench on the workbench. Something about Fangs’ insistence lights up Jughead’s inherent need to flaunt authority and it’s irritating him that Betty is the object of his newfound desire to stake his claim. Not that she is an object _to_ claim at all, nor a pawn in Jughead’s game of authoritarian chess, even if this instinctual interest were genuine. Which it is not. At all. 

From the corner of his eye, Jughead sees Toni staring at him curiously. She’s always been the one able to read him best and he’s not up for her trademark psychoanalysis of his ‘misplaced god complex,’ as she’d been known to call it. Trying to counter-steer, he swallows half of the fresh beer in two gulps before fiddling with the socket wrench. He flips it from hand to hand and feigns nonchalance in his response to Fangs. 

“Quit lookin’ at me, Fogarty, Sweets is the one trying to fuck her.” 

Toni’s staring intensifies and Jughead downs more beer. 

 

* * *

 

Five days. Five excruciatingly long days. That is how long Betty has been craving a strawberry milkshake and how long she has allowed the petulant, foot-stomping nine-year-old in her soul to run her life. Stubbornness is not something she likes to control her every movement; not when her history of stubbornness has resulted in a broken arm when she insisted she could race Archie across the monkey bars; nor when the weeks-long standoff with her mother over the length of her preferred dress for the eighth grade ball left her both without a dress and without permission to attend the dance; and especially not when her last bout of stubborn defiance to do things _her way_ left Betty with strangulation bruises on her neck, a fear deep in her bones, and a Pavlovian response of nausea to her ringtone. 

Stubbornness led her down the rabbit hole, and Betty should— _does—_ know better. 

Irritation over a smug asshole’s new job in her favorite diner is far too non-threatening for Betty to admit her faults, though. Instead she holds to her unspoken vow of avoidance, choosing instead to make a disappointing shake in Cheryl’s state of the art blender. 

She sips at the poorly made concoction and sighs. 

Cheryl would scoff at her, tell her that what Betty really needs is a good lay and not a milkshake. 

(Cheryl would not, strictly speaking, be wrong. But her cousin has also been telling Betty this every single night for the past week in an effort to have company while bar-hopping, and that hasn’t been a great selling point.) 

In any case, Betty isn’t willing to let Cheryl get that far this evening. Anxiety courses through Betty’s veins in a way it hasn’t since long before Jughead Jones ever barged through her door, not since her days were filled with that agonizing terror that if she set one toe out of line, she might die—or worse, her loved ones might die. In the nearly two years since Betty restarted her life in Riverdale, her dreams have been blessedly free of distorted voices in her ears or shadows in the corner of her eye. Riverdale made her feel safe, wrapping her in its quiet, suburban arms and whispering that its manicured lawns and frosted shop windows would help her to rebuild. 

The comfort of the town, her new friends, and the calming satisfaction of owning her business built Betty back up. 

Somehow all that safety shattered along with the window panes of the front door of Mysterious Letters. 

Almost nightly, Betty is up at one, two, five, six a.m., screaming into the blackness of her bedroom. 

_Stop writing that article, Betty. You’re messing with something you don’t understand._

_I hope you’re being a good girl, Betty._

_I watched you walk home from that bar tonight. Your friends are sinners, Betty. All that drinking, all that debauchery. You’re better than that._    

The endless calls to her landlord about busted locks, the sickeningly sweet ring of _lollipop, lollipop,_ the note addressed to ‘My darling B’ at the fifth crime scene. Phone calls that increased in frequency, text messages calling her classmates, her best friend, the cute editor on the student paper ‘sinners.’ 

It all haunts her, tumbling out of the box in the deepest corner of her brain where it had all been tucked neatly away. 

Like she had three years prior, Betty attempts to bury it with extra layers of concealer under her eyes and chipper ‘good mornings’ that edge just on the side of too chipper to her friends. It’s fine, she tells herself. Give it a few more days and the nightmares will settle, things will go back to normal. The jumpiness is just from overexhaustion. Minor noises will stop ringing out like gunshots. 

Once it all dies down, then she’ll go to Pop’s for a real shake. It won’t help to be under the watch of those judgemental, shrewd eyes right now. Feeling too _seen_ by someone who already doesn’t like her, who probably looks infuriatingly handsome in the trademark sodajerk uniform, will only make this stress worse. 

The slamming of Mysterious Letters’ front door echoes in her mind and Betty shudders. Blaming it on the cold glass of mediocre strawberry shake in her hand, she takes a large gulp and swallows the treat down with an extra Xanax. 

Tomorrow, Betty decides. She’ll just get a real shake tomorrow. 

 

 

Tomorrow creeps up on her with all the grace of a bull in a china shop. All the Xanax manages to do is calm her to the point where the darkness of her bedroom doesn’t sit oppressively on her chest, just waiting for her to gasp for air before it smothers her with its horrors. It does nothing for the equally oppressive weight of exhaustion that clings to Betty’s every pore. 

If anything, this will be the tell that tips off Cheryl. From across the driveway, Betty spies a flickering light through the den window that means Cheryl is still up and watching something on TV. Betty’s insomnia hobby of choice is baking, but nearly all her supplies are still in Cheryl’s kitchen after her cousin requested help on a ‘real’ brownie recipe to perfect before her foray into ‘fun’ brownies. If Betty were to retrieve her trays and flour, Cheryl would see that she’s breaking her usually ironclad sleep schedule—Betty loves a routine and being a business owner with a strict opening time she’s set for herself certainly hasn’t helped—and suss out that something’s wrong. 

Though she loves Cheryl with all her heart, Betty can’t bear to see the look of love tinged with pity that Cheryl had worn for the first weeks post-stalking, and then again the day following Jughead’s return to town. If she has to explain why she can’t sleep, that look will come back and it will be all Betty can do to not scream. 

She wants to bake cranberry scones but she doesn’t want them _that_ badly. 

Staring into the black of her bedroom ceiling reminds her of a cloth hood with two eyes cut out which, now that her anxiety is medically wrestled with for the time being, only serves to anger Betty. She’s angry that it’s been two years and this still gets the best of her, angry that she’s let an obnoxious man who thinks he’s more intimidating than he actually is crawl under her skin, and—above all—angry that she’s so angry. Tossing over once more with a huff, Betty clicks on her bedside lamp. The soft glow chases away the ghosts of her past and Betty fidgets with a tear in her quilt. 

Fed up, she pulls a book from the table that has sat untouched for a few weeks now. There hasn’t been any reason in particular that she put off starting the next book on her unread pile (yes there is, she chides herself, there’s a particular reason for _everything_ that’s been weird about the last few weeks) and since she’s up, she may as well get to it. The words of this world, distinctly different from her own, bathe her in warmth and it’s the most settled Betty has felt in ages. 

She finds touches of herself in the heroine—plucky, stubborn to a fault, fiercely protective of everything and everyone she loves. There are pieces of Cheryl and Polly and Veronica in the best friend, all the best pieces of the women she’d grown up with and mostly pushed away, and a line of dialogue so quintessentially Veronica that it makes her heart ache. 

It’s not until well into the early morning, several hundred pages into the novel, that Betty finally places who she sees in the love interest. Until the author reminds her of the man’s blond hair and boyish face, she had been imagining _goddamn Jughead’s_ lanky frame, dark locks, and maddeningly handsome smirk attached to the frequent mentions of blue eyes. 

That is the point at which she calls it quits, slipping a scrap of paper in to hold her place, and does her best not to think of real man who shares an eye color and the same loyalty toward his own loved ones as the fictional man does. It’s hard not to shake this portrait of Jughead from her mind for the entire next day, and even harder to do so when he walks through the front door of Mysterious Letters at the end of her session with JB, his stormy eyes and messy hair causing her breath to catch. 

Thankfully, the illusion shatters the moment he opens his mouth. 

“I’m only here because JB wouldn’t give up on it,” he grumbles. 

That at least explains the excitability of her young friend for the past two hours; Betty had made her usual noncommittal hums of acknowledgement that she does whenever JB mentions Jughead—which is a _lot_ considering that prior to his arrival in town, Betty hadn’t heard a peep about his existence—and she realizes far too late that JB still incorrectly assumes she can pioneer a friendship between her tutor and her brother. 

For an intuitive kid, JB is remarkably blind to the reality of this situation. 

Jughead is still determined to look anywhere but at Betty herself and his refusal once again to acknowledge her existence pisses her off. Damn him and his superiority complex and that stupid leather jacket with its bright embroidered snake eyes winking at her from every block of town. 

The jacket in question is zipped all the way up to his chin, a silent indicator to both her and JB that he does not plan on staying long. 

 _What on earth,_ she wants to know, _is it about me that makes him want to run for the hills?_

(She knows what it is, Betty isn’t stupid. She grew up receiving that look from both her parents and from every classmate she rubbed the wrong way; that look of _you’re not good enough, proper enough, anything_ _enough for me. You’re not right for my life._ It’s the same look Betty gave herself in the mirror every day of her life until college, when the atmosphere and Veronica’s lifelong urging allowed her to finally let loose. The look that she could really only break free from when Cheryl sat down across from her in a Boston police station and told her that she was a fucking idiot if she thought she was ever able to control what others thought of her, whether it was her mother chastising her about grades or a murderous psychopath telling her that he committed murders in the name of her perfection.) 

Betty’s presence _inconveniences_ Jughead. And quite frankly, his inconveniences her as well. At least they can agree on wanting to be as far away from each other as possible. 

She murmurs an excuse about needing to do the books and escapes to the back office before JB can protest. Betty hides until she hears the door close and the bell jingle, and only then can she breathe properly. Before she can chicken out, she’s dialing Cheryl’s number. 

“Fine, Cher, I give. Pick a place and lend me a top and I’ll go out with you tonight.” 

 

* * *

 

Maybe it’s his own subconscious beginning to reflect his normal patterns of outward self-sabotage, but once the mere thought of _fucking Betty Cooper_ exists in the ether, Jughead’s brain outdoes itself in its cruel imaginations. 

The early hours of Friday morning are spent tossing and turning from watching dream-Sweet Pea take dream-Betty out on a date to the Wyrm in its former glory, watching them flirt and smile from his dream location behind the bar, grumbling to himself when he watches Sweet Pea stoop from his absurd height to sweetly kiss the blushing woman and back her up against the pool table. It morphs into Betty flirting and blushing at _him_ across the bar, playing with the tiny straw in her drink and looking up at him through dark lashes that never seem to end, leaning over the sticky counter to kiss him with the taste of whiskey on her tongue. 

Had it ended there, Jughead might have been able to save face—if only with himself. But, no, of course his inner dickhead fratboy had to rear its ugly head and turn the lovely kiss into something that still has him gritting his teeth and staring at the ground hours later when he picks up JB inside the bookstore.

Jughead tried to beg off, feign forgetfulness, but JB had texted him no less than three reminders to ‘come in ML today!’ and he couldn’t very well explain to his sixteen-year-old sister that the reason he doesn’t want to see her tutor today is because he woke up moaning from a dream of said tutor on her knees behind the bar of the Wyrm with her hands on his hips and his cock in her mouth. 

He has to _take care_ of things the moment he wakes up and Jughead spends the entire morning trying to shake his disgust with himself afterward. He hasn’t had such a demeaning sex dream since his high school days when Sweet Pea and Fangs both made an unfortunate habit out of confiding their _own_ pervy dreams to Jughead. Unsure if he’s more perturbed by the actions or the star of his dream, Jughead spins his thoughts in circles until he is more than convinced that the dream was a result of pent up frustration and the fact that he finds Betty rather pretty. 

( _Objectively_ pretty, he reasons with himself.) 

Even so, it is hard to stand in the doorway of her store and watch those shimmering green eyes stare him down when Jughead’s mind has been so thoroughly in the gutter that he may as well be covered in filth. If she can tell she was the literal object of his dream, Betty doesn’t let on and instead retreats into her office as soon as possible. 

JB is put out for the whole ride back to Sunnyside but finally perks up when Jughead asks about the party she’d mentioned she may go to that night. “My band friend is playing a set with his _actual_ band at some Northside house party and I finally get to use the ‘I’m with the band’ card. Highlight of my young life,” JB sighs without an ounce of sarcasm. She’s so earnest in her passions that Jughead frequently finds himself trying to tone down his own sardonic humor in efforts to not corrupt that particular facet of her innocence. 

Life is for the enjoyment of things, he tells himself. With only some mirth. 

(It’s a work in progress.) 

“Make sure you call me if you need a ride, okay?” It’s the most older brother thing Jughead has ever said and it feels foreign, so much so that JB rolls her eyes. He shrugs at her as they enter the trailer and dig into the pizza FP must have ordered for them, as if to say _Yeah yeah I know, but still._ Before he can verbalize it, JB is halfway into her bedroom. 

“James doesn’t drink when he has to play. Something about ‘refusing to play into the stereotype,’” she says with visual air quotes. “And besides, I don’t drink anything I didn’t open or pour myself. Plus I carry mace.” The door slams, followed shortly by Rilo Kiley blasting through her speakers. 

Jughead is confused by her nonchalance until he realizes that she assumed his over-protectiveness had more to do with her being drugged or assaulted, and not with getting falling over drunk like he’d actually meant. Even more than before, Jughead wants to strangle his inner perv and every other male on the planet. He settles for vowing to teach JB how to throw a proper punch, and maybe enlisting Fangs for his boxing expertise.  

As though summoned, Fangs’ name is on his buzzing phone. “We’re going out tonight,” his friend shouts. “I already know you’re off tomorrow so you have no excuse. And even if you did, you haven’t met Kevin so I’m holding that over your head.” The line disconnects before Jughead even had the chance to protest but the idea doesn’t immediately put him off, so he stuffs another slice of pizza in his mouth and steers his bike in the direction of Southside Motors. 

Whatever Jughead had been expecting of Fangs’ long-term boyfriend, Kevin Keller wasn’t it. He remembered the name from growing up, but only because of _Sheriff_ Keller, not his son who had been a few years behind them in school. They make an odd couple between Fangs with his spiked earring, all-black ensemble, and numerous gang scars, and Kevin with his Ken doll haircut and boat shoes, who works in Betty Cooper’s store and plays G&G as a grown adult. 

But he has a warm smile and Fangs is giddy to finally have them meet—though that may be the bottle of cheap wine he’d already split with Toni—so Jughead lets it all slide. If his friends are happy, he’s happy. When Kevin beats him to the punch in making fun of Sweet Pea for turning up the stereo when a Billy Joel song comes on, Jughead can even forgive the pretentious craft beer he’s drinking. 

All good will goes south when they’re gathering their things to depart for the bar and Kevin gives Jughead the evil eye for shrugging on his Serpents jacket. 

“Oh you _cannot_ wear that out,” Kevin warns. 

Jughead raises an eyebrow. Reformed gang member or not, Fangs owes his roots to the Serpents and Jughead will be damned if this preppy asshole is going to judge them all for it. The years apart haven’t made Fangs any less in tune with Jughead’s mood swings and he lifts his hands in a truce before Jughead can even open his mouth. 

“Don’t get your panties in a twist, Jug. It’s not the patch, it’s the jacket.” 

The confusion must be clear on his face because the rest of the group exchanges gleeful grins and Toni takes particular pleasure in making a show of patting him on the back before saying, “I mean we’re all for you wearing leather to a gay bar, Jones, but just be ready to be aggressively hit on by a very specific crowd.” He flushes and tries not to be too hasty in his removal of the jacket. It’s a bit too cold to only use the flannel tied around his waist as an outer layer, but he is willing to take his chances of freezing to death over having to explain his unintended fashion choices to god knows how many strangers he already wouldn’t have wanted to talk to.     

Despite Kevin’s decidedly preppy appearance, the unexpected strobe lights and techno music, and the absurd name, walking into The Foxy Forest with all his best friends has Jughead feeling nostalgic for their teenage days in the Wyrm. The only Wyrm that has a Betty Cooper in revealing clothing, though, is the one from his dream the prior night, and Jughead has to blink a few times before his brain registers that she is there in the flesh—and showing quite a bit more of it than Jughead has seen before. He fights the urge to turn on his heel, watching Fangs and Kevin beeline for her location at a corner table. At the sight of two drinks sweating on coasters in front of Betty, Jughead feels both a flash of disappointment and irritation. 

The warning Fangs gave Sweet Pea rings in his ears and Jughead remembers that Betty must at least interested in men, but the locale of this gathering has him trying to reconcile various conversations. The two drinks mean maybe she _is_ seeing someone and when a petite woman with flaming red hair joins the table to kiss Kevin and Fangs on the cheek and then reclaim the drink Betty pushes in her direction, a flame of jealousy licks up his spine. 

From the table, the rest of his group stares him down and Jughead realizes he’s frozen and looking like a true asshole, so he shuffles their way and prays for a swift death. Toni takes pity on him, turning to a side conversation to save him from small talk and looking positively delighted. “I did _not_ know Cheryl fucking Blossom was out. This is fantastic.” 

 _Ah,_ he thinks. That might explain Betty’s red-haired companion. The weird feeling in his stomach abates and Jughead relaxes as much as he can in this uncomfortable situation. Betty seems to be ignoring him as staunchly as he is her, so Jughead throws himself into conversation with Toni and Kevin with feigned enthusiasm. Toni’s gaze flicks over to Cheryl Blossom so many times that he and Kevin eventually share a look and pivot their positions to allow Toni to break free. 

“So,” Jughead hedges, clearing his throat and swallowing half his drink in one gulp. Toni bought the first round so it’s something with tequila and Jughead knows this harbinger all too well. At least one of them will need to be physically dragged home and he has a feeling that from his intense discomfort, it might be him. “Fangs said you work at the bookstore?” 

Kevin smiles and nods excitedly. “Betty coming to town was seriously such a blessing. I clerked at the Sheriff’s office for my dad and it was soul-crushing, so once Fangs mentioned that someone was opening a new business I was all over it. The whole place is Betty’s vision and she’s the owner, but she was so great about letting me worm my way into the project.” Jughead nods along, cataloging these minor details and doing his best to not appear too eager. This woman baffles him. “At first we were all shocked Cheryl had made a real human connection, but holy _crap_ Betty has mellowed her out since she came to town to live with her.” Tequila apparently has similar effects on Kevin that it does on Jughead, he’s become quite chatty. “They’re pretty much each other’s only real family.” 

Though there’s no possible way the two women in question can actually hear Kevin discussing them over the nauseating beat of the music, when Jughead glances their way, Cheryl is eyeing him and Betty quickly breaks eye contact. Kevin shouts that he’s getting more drinks and before he knows it, Jughead is two tequila-somethings deep and left alone with Sweet Pea and Betty while the rest of their group joins the mass of moving bodies on the dance floor. Sweets, heeding Fangs’ warning, is making stilted conversation with Betty and keeps his eyes resolutely on her face. Jughead takes the opportunity to relish in the shimmery shirt she’s wearing that exposes her collarbones and the tight black jeans hugging her hips. He’s leering and he knows it and his only solution is to finish his drink, focusing intently on what she’s saying. It’s more about Mysterious Letters, which Jughead will admit he wants to know more about, especially given the details Kevin let slip, and he finds himself drunk on her words in addition to the tequila. 

Sweet Pea excuses himself to get another drink, offering to grab the next round, but Betty declines and asks for a water. Jughead nods his request but Sweet Pea squints at him. “I’ll just get us all water.” 

Bastard. 

Probably for the best, since Betty watches him carefully now and he finds himself grateful for the liquid courage but glad he hasn’t hit the trademark Jones level of sloppy. “JB never shuts up about you.” He winces. That sounded more accusatory than he intended. “I just mean—she clearly looks up to you and—and I know we got off on the wrong foot, but I’m glad she has someone like you in her life. Lord knows we’ve got a shit mom, so you’re good for her. Or so FP says, I guess. Who am I to tell, I’ve been MIA.” _There’s_ that tequila rambling. Shit. 

Betty smiles, but her eyes are still guarded. He can see her fidgeting, shifting her weight from side to side and picking at her nails. If he didn’t know any better—and he might not, she is an enigma to him—Jughead might think she’s craving nicotine or something stronger.  As though she can feel him analyzing her movement, Betty stills and stretches her palms out flat on the table, wincing when one hand hits a sticky patch. “She’s a really good kid, Jughead. I’ve been more than happy to help her out.” 

He swallows the lump in his throat and when Sweet Pea returns, chugs his water in one go. The asshole takes the opportunity to get his own jab in. “Did Jug tell you that he nearly came here in his motorcycle leathers?” 

Jughead shoots daggers at Sweet Pea when Betty chokes on her water in laughter. “In my defense—” he starts. 

“In his defense, he’d marry that damn bike if he could.” 

Her giggle is so endearing that Jughead almost stops hating Sweet Pea for a minute, almost forgives her for being everything he wants to hate and for always looking at him like she wants to crack open his skull to see what’s inside. “You trying to overcompensate for something there, Jughead?” There’s so much mirth in her voice that he’d applaud her if he weren’t the butt of her joke. 

Sweets lets out a raucous laugh and high fives Betty. “I like you,” he snorts. 

Once again, Jughead is reminded of his dream and the simmering jealousy he’d felt walking in catches fire. He needs to get a fucking grip. Without a word, he snatches Sweet Pea’s water and drinks the whole thing before stomping outside. A smoke will have to do.   

Cold night air slaps a little sobriety into him and Jughead exhales deeply before digging for his lighter and pack. His subconscious and the tequila are getting along too well, highlighting all the elements of Betty Cooper that he finds attractive; the spot on her bottom lip that’s darker than her lipstick from biting at it during silence, the prim and proper ponytail he is dying to sink his hands into, the quick wit, the determination and entrepreneurship it takes to start her own business. Everything about her overwhelms him and Jughead has to suck in the nicotine quickly before he mind runs off again. 

He knows nothing about her, Jughead reminds himself. Maybe Kevin paints her as a wonderful person, but he’s her best friend and therefore wearing a distinct pair of rose-colored glasses. More likely than not, Betty Cooper is everything that Jughead first assumed her to be: a good little rich girl trying to make her penance in his hometown. 

When the bar door swings open and the girl in question materializes beside him, Jughead wants to swear loudly. Maybe he should, maybe it’ll shake her off or loosen her up. He’ll admit that he wouldn’t mind spending time with someone who can dish it out as quickly and as well as she’s proven she can. 

Her face betrays her surprise in seeing him there, jumping a little when his movement gives him away. “Oh,” she says. “Sorry, I just wanted some air. Do you mind company?” 

“Only if you don’t mind me ruining your air.” 

Betty huffs a small laugh but doesn’t respond. She doesn’t leave either, and he can’t tell whether that’s a good or a bad thing. He also can’t tell if he wants her to or not. He’s half expecting her to burden the silence with mindless chatter, try to spin the time into a campaign in favor of herself or strike up conversation about JB or their mutual friends to remind him that she _belongs_ there too. She remains silent, staring off into the dark and gnawing on her bottom lip again.

It’s not bad like this, he thinks. This might be tolerable. 

Her eyes sparkle in the dim light of the entryway and Jughead gets lost in the faraway look on her face. In the cool air, with the sickeningly loud beat of the bass muted by the distance, Betty seems more at ease than when they were all inside. For a wild, hopeful moment, Jughead wonders if this has more to do with him than it does with the lack of crowds and noise. 

As though simply to screw with him, Jughead’s subconscious brings up the dreamscape image seared into his brain of those eyes flickering up at him from below, with her nails scraping his thighs and her mouth hot against him. He wants so badly for that to be reality that his lighter falls from his shaking hand and he jumps at the sound of it clattering to the pavement. 

Before he can even breathe, Betty crouches down to pick it up for him and he cannot help himself for letting his eyes slide over the curve of her hips. 

Self-aware to a fault, Jughead quietly berates himself for acting like such a meathead. He almost doesn’t hear Betty over the thundering in his ears when her fingers brush against his to pass over the Bic. “Quit staring at my ass, Jones,” she says, with a playful lilt to her voice. 

He’s never been _good_ at this, never had anyone to even try to be good at flirting with. All Jughead knows is the advice given to him by Chad, the head bartender at his old gig, who was a pro at getting big cash tips (and numbers written in sloppy penmanship on napkins). ‘You gotta put them down just a little bit when you flirt, bro,’ he’d said. ‘Then they think they have to work harder for your approval, AKA better tips and more bedroom eyes.’ The whole idea seemed counterintuitive to Jughead, but he’d seen it work for Sweet Pea a million times before and he’d grown up being brash and rude to appear older, to seem better suited as his father’s right hand. Much to his surprise, his tips improved the more he behaved like an entitled asshole. He never got any numbers, which was more than okay with him, but maybe this really _was_ what girls wanted. 

Betty strikes him as more self-assured than some of the women he got twenty dollar tips from for one vodka soda, but she’s smiling at him and deliberately drawing attention to her ass, so he rolls the dice. 

“Your ass looks good,” he drawls. “Wouldn’t have pegged you for the type of girl who owns such tight pants or hangs out in clubs on Fridays. You seem a little too good girl Betty Draper for such debauchery.” 

The pink high on her cheeks from him complimenting her bleeds into a furious red and Jughead knows within an instant that his plan backfired. _Fuck you, Chad,_ he thinks, desperate to find the right words among the tequila in his brain to explain that he didn’t mean to be _such_ an ass, he just doesn’t know how to talk to pretty women who kind of infuriate him but kind of turn him on. _There,_ he tells himself, _that might work._

But it’s too late, because the soft fingertips that still lingered on his palm are clenching back around his lighter and he swears that her petal pink nail polish is tinged with red when she pulls it from his grip and launches it into the black abyss of the parking lot. 

He’s expecting a verbal lashing, or at the very least an emphatic _go fuck yourself,_ but all Jughead gets from Betty is silent fury. Her green eyes are full of tears and she walks away from him, her heels clicking on the pavement until the night swallows her whole. 

 

* * *

 

When you grow up with Alice Cooper and are the object of a murderous stalker’s affections all before the age of 22, you learn to listen to your instincts. This is precisely why Betty is so mad at herself for not following her gut instinct and leaving the bar on Friday night when she could tell, after less than one drink, that this was not the time or mindset to be out in a crowded club in. 

She knew it was a bad idea even more so when Kevin and Fangs showed up in a group that included Jughead, still surly, still handsome, and still pissing her the hell off. She’d tried to stick it out, even relaxed enough to not want to scream into bleeding fists, made light conversation with the guy who looked like he should be named for anything _but_ a flower, relished in joining Sweet Pea in poking fun at Jughead. 

Even managed to spend five minutes alone with Jughead, when the sweaty atmosphere of the bar became too much. 

Even _flirted_ with him, and he’d flirted back. 

If only he’d chosen any other turn of phrase; hadn’t sneered ‘good girl’ at her or called the evening ‘debauchery.’ If only Betty had listened to herself and just gone home. 

Instead she had let a burning rage overtake her, anxiety blurring the edges of her vision, and walked all the way across town in uncomfortable heels. Echoes of _You’d better be a good girl, Betty,_ followed her the whole way home and by the time she let herself in Cheryl’s side door, her hands bleed profusely and her shaking legs couldn’t hold her up anymore. 

It’s how the whole group from the bar—sans Jughead and Sweet Pea—found her two hours later; Cheryl entangled with the pink-haired girl whose name Betty never caught, and Kevin and Fangs giggling drunkenly, shouting out for Betty to feed them drunk snacks. Betty’s slumped, shaking form had been enough to sober them all up and the girl with the pink hair’s eyes went wide. Cheryl and Fangs had ushered her out while Kevin sank to the floor and pulled Betty into his lap. 

“It’s okay, I’ve got you,” he whispered. “You’re safe.”   

Her friends take care of her, reinforce the fact of her safety, keep her head above water, and Betty could cry at their kindness. They don’t press her to tell them what happened and she’s grateful. She sleeps fitfully on the couch, head in Cheryl’s lap and Kevin playing with her hair, until she wakes to the quiet sounds of dishes clinking well into the next morning. 

“I didn’t tell him any of the specifics, obviously,” she can hear Fangs say in a low voice. “Just asked what he said before she took off and he couldn’t exactly say, other than he tried to pull a bro-type flirting move and it backfired.” 

Kevin snorts. “He doesn’t strike me as the type who would know flirting if it smacked him in the face.” 

“He doesn’t, he’s piss-poor at talking to anybody he hasn’t known for his entire damn life. I’m shocked he even tried, I didn’t think the two of them had gotten over their determination to hate each other.” 

The conversation continues, but Cheryl is speaking too quietly for Betty to make it out so she closes her eyes again. That at least explains Jughead’s weird pivot in conversational tactics, Betty thinks. Despite how triggering his attempts had been, some of her anger washes away know that she knows he hadn’t intended to be as obnoxious as he’d come off. 

“Hey there, B,” Cheryl calls out, carrying plates of bacon and sloppy pancakes into the room, with Kevin and Fangs trailing behind her. “How are you feeling?” 

“Like shit,” Betty mumbles. “And embarrassed.” 

“Don’t you dare,” Kevin insists. “Don’t be embarrassed for how your trauma makes you act.” The word ‘trauma’ has her cringing, but Betty knows Kevin only means well. He doesn’t know that the thought of being known as the traumatized girl makes her feel small and weak. None of them do, they’re only trying to take care of her. 

It’s high time Betty take on some of that work for herself. 

 

 

Betty is soothed by cleaning, and it serves as the perfect mindless activity to do while she tries to sort out her own head. For this reason, she closes Mysterious Letters for a couple days, cancels her Monday tutoring session with JB, and scours the whole place. The time to herself allows Betty to spin through her usual cycles of rehashing her _trauma_ and then avoiding it altogether and, while exhausting, it helps to get it out of her system. It gets worse before it gets better, but by Tuesday morning, she’s managed to get a full night of sleep without any nightmares. 

It may not be the most healthy way to process—given that there is a distinct lack of any real processing—and Betty knows this, but being ‘passably okay’ feels enough for now. 

She’s okay enough to not feel an immediate flare of annoyance when she watches Jughead pass by the front door of the store Tuesday afternoon once, twice, _four_ times. He appears to be pacing up and down the intersection, casting glances at the shop windows every few steps. Out of curiosity more than anything else, Betty flips the lock and leans against the open door frame to watch the process. 

It takes a few beats for him to notice her standing there and it startles him so much that he drops the lit cigarette in his hand. His expression goes through a thorough journey of emotions, starting with shock and eventually landing on sheepish before he crosses the street to hover just below the entryway steps. 

Betty quirks at eyebrow at him. “Your pacing and general aura of existential angst is off-putting so can you either come in like an adult or go pace somewhere else?” 

“You don't like me.” 

“I don't know you.” Betty bites her lip and thinks before continuing. She can’t exactly blame her overreaction and consequent meltdown on him, but Jughead’s comments certainly hadn’t helped. “And you’ve been a complete jackass to me.”  

“Fair enough.” There's an extended pause. Jughead rubs at the back of his neck and Betty tracks the movement. His nerves seem to increase when he sees her notice the tic. “So, uh, when I ...left—” his voice catches and he continues with less bravado than she’s witnessed him speak with. “When we got chased out of town, FP tossed most of my shit and then liberated everything else, books included. And you obviously know that JB lives the record-listening kind of teen angst. But she’s also a teenage girl who won’t let me in her room so I can’t even get at those and I'm bored out of my mind.”

Betty's brow crinkles in confusion. “And so you're wearing a hole in my sidewalk for fun?” 

Jughead huffs out a laugh; relaxed looks good on his features. “No, that was me trying to determine if you would exercise your right to refuse service if I came through the door.”

 _Hah_ , she thinks. An amusing turn of events, given that they have been actively avoiding each other for weeks and this is the first time either of them are willingly sharing the same air. She’ll let him in, of course, she’s not going to be a bitch about it. But Betty wants to make him work for it so she feigns confusion and blinks expectantly at him. 

He's caught on by now that she really wants to drag this out, and Betty can see the effort it takes him not to roll his eyes. Heaving a sigh, he meets her eye. His eyes practically shine in the midday sunlight. “I'm looking for something to read.” 

Betty knows her canary-eating grin is over the top. It's still satisfying, though. “Well come on in, then. Can I make you a cup of tea while you browse?”

 

.

.

.

 

_tbc._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you endlessly for the kind words of encouragement while I took my sweet-ass time working through this chapter. and infinite thanks to my liv twin, iconic-ponytail, for her beta expertise and for sending relevant gifsets screaming KINGDOM VIBES at me. 
> 
> as per usual, please leave a comment/review if you can <3


	4. the knife

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> you know how sometimes six months go by and you haven't updated your WIP?

_oh, the knife of insight brought me to my knees_ _  
__broke me down and taught me how to see_ _  
__and I know and I know and I know_ _  
__that maybe we should take some time_ _  
__get this out, make this right_ _  
_“the knife,” maggie rogers

 

* * *

 

Jughead declines her offer of a hot drink—despite the fact that whatever she’s put in her own mug steaming on the counter smells wonderful—and Betty retreats behind the register to sip at her drink. He can tell she is making a concentrated effort to not begin a conversation she clearly wants to start, and he’s grateful for the space. His ego is bruised enough by having to crawl in here after insulting her a few days prior; though he’s still unsure if it was insulting or upsetting, or both perhaps, and Jughead is more confused than ever by Betty Cooper after the dressing down that Fangs gave him over the weekend. 

Even Toni had taken part in berating him, which was he was surprised by. Not that Toni would ever pass up a chance to take him down a few pegs, but she doesn’t know Betty like Fangs does and Jughead was caught off guard by her sudden and fierce defense of the woman. 

She’d said something even more cryptic than Fangs, that Jughead’s comments ‘struck a nerve,’ and it makes him wonder what conversations happen when he isn’t around. Did Toni and Betty become friends quickly enough that she learned more in one evening with her than Jughead did from several interactions? Is Betty actually an open book, one that is open to every reader but him?

Before he could find out what it was that Toni was talking about—or how she knew anything _to_ talk about—she had flounced away from him. “Oh, and by the way, Jug? Negging is the worst kind of flirting technique. Don’t be such a dumbass next time.” 

Jughead doesn’t intend for there to be a _next time_ , given that the indulgence in his attraction to Betty had been entirely fueled by drunkenness and had consequently blown up in his face. He knows an apology is more than necessary, though, which is how he ends up on the corner of Main Street three days in a row, staring at the drawn blinds and CLOSED sign on the front door of Mysterious Letters. 

It had seemed odd, but maybe this was Betty’s (fairly effective) way of telling him to fuck off. It is JB’s cancelled tutoring session the day before that trips an alarm bell in his head and forces him down to her shop for the fourth day in a row.

In the interim, his antsiness had ramped up so much that Jughead went digging through old drawers and pockets to find the collection of rings he used to wear when he was younger. They started as an early manifestation of Serpent branding: the branded rings were less official and not as big a deal to wear so Jughead snagged a few from the back room of the Wyrm, and then sought out even more clunky bands from wherever he could find them after he grew to like the weight of them on his hands. They made for a great fidgeting tool when ignoring teachers in class, looked just menacing enough to keep any strangers from bothering him, and eventually became a far more convenient alternative to brass knuckles. 

He left them behind when they got the hell out of dodge—but not having anything to do with his hands only fed into his nicotine habit. 

Both are at play now: Jughead holds a half-kicked cigarette in his left hand, while using his right thumb to spin the ring on his right forefinger. He stares across the intersection, the OPEN sign on the door to Mysterious Letters both a relief and a source of terror.

The words ‘I'm sorry’ roll around in his mouth uncomfortably. Jughead knows that apologizing for Friday is the very least he could do. And if he’s being honest, he should probably apologize for his entire attitude toward Betty since coming home. That one requires him swallowing more pride than he’s comfortable with, quite frankly. 

To her credit, Betty isn’t giving him a hard time about any of it. He half-expects her to shut the door in his face and when she doesn’t, Jughead realizes that he has sorely misjudged her. 

(He already knew this, but yet another instance of her being kinder than she needs to be toward him makes it all the more obvious.) 

She isn’t even pressing him into a stilted conversation as he looks around the store, trying to keep his expression neutral as though he is not thoroughly impressed by the work she’s done to make this former shithole bar look cozy and inviting. He hadn’t really paid attention during the last two times he's been inside and it's another pang of regret to add to his laundry list of apologies to her. 

Her eyes track him as he meanders through the shelves, which he tries to not be offended by. Betty is appraising him, determining her next step. She is _not_ watching him like a hawk, ready to throw him out or call the cops at the slightest hint of shiftiness, like every single business owner or employee had for his adolescence, Pop Tate excluded. 

It had taken months of being in Toledo until Jughead finally realized that no one behind the bodega counter and no restaurant cashier was moments away from accusing him of stealing, or of conducting illegal activity. Maybe in his teens all the Riverdale storefronts had a point in keeping an eye on him, the Serpents logo bright on his back and fingers itching to flip them off, but even growing up they had it out for him. They had it out for all of the poor Southsider kids; knew that their parents were drug addicts or drug runners, that the kids with holes in their shoes were close to starving, that a good portion of them barely had housing security, let alone consistent meals. 

Betty Cooper isn’t waiting for Jughead to pocket a new hardcover or brandish a shaky pistol and tell her to empty the till. But he can still feel her eyes on the back of his neck. 

He rolls his neck to shake the feeling, a couple of joints popping in a satisfying manner. He can’t stop the groan he lets out as the tension in his back releases but he reddens quickly, remembering that he’s not alone and that he’s groaned in other manners while thinking about the woman he’s sharing space with. 

A glance behind him has Betty breaking eye contact quickly, her own cheeks looking a little pink. 

Pink _er_ , he should say. She looked quite pale when he came in, with heavy circles under her eyes that he knows better than most are a result of little to no sleep. 

Jughead is dying to know what it is about her that keeps her up at night, that all his friends apparently know about now. He knows he doesn’t have the right to ask. It’s possible JB might know, but he would feel too uncomfortable putting her in that position. 

Instead, he tries for a slight smile in her direction. She isn’t looking at him anymore so it hardly matters, but it makes Jughead feel the tiniest bit better. 

He is only able to browse for a few minutes before the silence gets to him. He’s stared at the same spot on the Used Nonfiction shelf for long enough that if Betty is still watching him, she's likely to think he’s gone crazy. “It looks nice in here,” he tosses over his shoulder. An olive branch of sorts. It’s the best thing he has to offer, the only thing. “You can’t even tell this used to be a crappy dive bar.” 

Betty looks up from where she’s texting on her phone. He wonders who's on the other end of her messages, if he'll be hearing from Fangs about this later. “Well, I should hope so. I stripped the floors and repainted them all by myself. The calluses better have been worth it.” She’s curt, but there’s something of a smile in her eyes. They look at each other, not speaking, for another few beats before Jughead is finally the one to break. 

“I'm gonna, uh,” he gestures aimlessly behind him at the shelves, as though he needs to indicate to her that he's going to keep browsing. He is in her damn _bookstore,_ she knows he’s going to look at books. She raises an eyebrow at him, suppressing what he knows is a laugh at his very laughable floundering.  

“You don't have to keep me company, Jughead. I’m used to being in here alone, I won’t be offended.” 

He swallows hard before turning back around. 

The thing is, Jughead realizes, he’s not so sure that Betty is alone in the store that often. There is a constant stream of customers in and out, some dropping in to say hello and ask how she’s feeling—“Bad cold,” Jughead hears her lie to explain the days with the CLOSED sign—others to ask about a book they’ve ordered, still more to drop off donations in small stacks or large bags. Betty seems to be well and truly ingrained into the fabric of Riverdale, in a way that he doesn’t think he ever was in his hometown. It sets his teeth on edge, even if he now knows it’s an earned spot in the community; there’s no way someone with her genuine smile and knack for small talk wouldn’t fit in well here. Especially not someone with a booming small business that replaced the infamous seedy bar. 

He takes a few laps around the shelves, eavesdropping and browsing, until he finally settles in front of the True Crime & Mysteries section—by far one of the largest, and denoted with a large hand-painted silhouette of Nancy Drew with her magnifying glass. Jughead smiles when he spots a framed print of one of the classic hardback covers, _Nancy’s Mysterious Letter_. She named her store after a Nancy Drew book and clearly loves true crime; a woman after his own heart. 

_Damn_ it. 

The woman in question looks thoroughly amused when she finds him, some time later, sitting on the floor and thumbing through an Ann Rule he hasn’t read before. “That's a good one,” she says, startling him. Betty cringes in apology when she sees him jump. “Sorry, poor etiquette to sneak up on someone if they’re reading about murder.” 

Jughead shrugs at her and smiles. “I wouldn’t have blamed you if you came at me with a weapon at this rate.” 

“Give it time.” 

 

 

* * *

 

 

“I’m fine, Cheryl.” 

Across the counter, sipping on her freshly brewed tea, Cheryl stares her down. “Forgive me if I don’t believe you, cousin. You’ll remember that I have seen every shade of the aftermath of that sick son of a bitch torturing you. I may have been drunk when we came home on Friday, but those scars on your palms don’t lie, and I know you haven’t been sleeping. Cheap concealer in the wrong shade doesn’t lie either.” 

Self-conscious, Betty’s hands drift to the puffy skin under her eyes. She bristles in defense before remembering that she had in fact run out of several products in her makeup routine and had resorted to a crappy sample from the back of her bathroom cabinet that did not match her skin tone very well. “Please leave it be, Cher.” 

“Not until you tell me what that beanie-wearing cad said to set off all of this.” 

Betty blushes. She isn’t quite ready to share that Jughead’s—admittedly triggering—comments were in direct response to her own flirting. She _also_ isn’t ready to acknowledge some of the finer details of her interactions with the Black Hood. Cheryl knows a lot, almost everything, but Betty has never really sifted through everything on her own, let alone with someone else. Does she even want to explain to Cheryl that the Black Hood exploited her every insecurity from growing up with perfectionist parents and made Betty feel like every single thing she did was worthy of punishment? 

Is she willing to admit out loud that she started to believe all of the horrible things that monster said to her, about her? 

Does she have the heart to say that a rude comment from a man on how much of a ‘nice girl’ she is supposed to be is enough to shake her to her core—to send her reeling back into a spiral of _I need to be better, I need to fix this_?  

“B?” 

The sharp press of Cheryl’s manicure against Betty’s wrist breaks her reverie, alerting Betty to her own shakey palms and clenched teeth. It’s likely that the only reason her palms aren’t bleeding is because she has the inventory book in her hands. Her cousin’s voice is softer when she speaks next, but no less intense. “I think you should move back into the house for a little while.” The protest must be clear on Betty’s face because before she can even open her mouth, Cheryl cuts her off. “It will make _me_ feel better, Betty. Please?”   

With deliberate steadiness, Betty places the ledger on the countertop and presses her palms into the cool of the wood. It isn’t a step back if she does it for shared peace of mind. 

Right? 

“How about I think about it?” 

Cheryl deems this acceptable, nods, and moves on. 

“Excellent,” she chirps. “Now please regale me with your new organization plan like I know you’re dying to.” 

  
  
  


 

 

_I’m watching you, Elizabeth. They’re sinners, you’re all sinners._

The first time he broke into her apartment, Betty thought it was a run-of-the-mill burglary. She called her super to fix the busted lock, found it odd that not even her high school graduation gift from Cheryl of ruby earrings were taken, filed a report with the police, and bought a baseball bat. 

It alarmed her, sure, but she chose to live in a large city and large cities have crime. 

Veronica took it worse than she did, if she were honest. 

“ _B,”_ her friend shrieked into the phone. “I’m buying you an alarm system, I don’t care what you say. That’s terrifying!” 

“I know.” Betty placated her, because it really _was_ scary. She accepted the gifted alarm system and slept with the baseball bat beside her bed. 

The guy she was semi-casually seeing—she liked him and she definitely liked how he made her feel in bed, but Betty didn’t know if he was someone she could _love_ —jokingly asked if he should be worried about her whacking him to death in the middle of the time when he saw the bat. 

“Just stay on your side of the bed, Trev, and you’ll be fine,” she joked right back. 

Trev was his first demand. 

_He’s leading you astray, Elizabeth. He’ll turn you into a sinner._

It had been an accident, really, that Betty entered his scope. Her summer internship with _Dorchester Reporter_ placed her across several beats, being such a small paper, so her write-up of a midmorning shooting at a diner and the death of a high school music teacher were folded in with high school sports coverage and a famous author’s visit to the city library. 

If anything, the burglary and the missed calls from a blocked number set off the lightbulb of curiosity that maybe it was all the same person. 

Same _man,_ considering his distaste of Betty’s time with Trevor and Archie. 

The stalker shots of her leaving a bar with Veronica one Thursday before the semester started tipped her over from scared-but-curious to downright terrified. 

Scrawled across the photo and stuck to her apartment door with a knife was written, _say nothing or she dies first._

The follow-up phone call ( _She’s turning you into a whore who wants nothing but sex and alcohol and who forgets propriety. You’re better than that, Elizabeth. I need you to be better than that.)_ was when Betty’s brain fizzled into compliance. Yes, these things were being said by some crazed stalker, but they were so reminiscent of the perfection that the Coopers expected of their daughters—no partying, no boyfriends, no _fun,_ only straight-As and pastel cardigans and pleated skirts—that she couldn’t help but revert. 

She broke up with Trev; partly because of the request and partly because the whole situation felt so violating that Betty could barely accept a touch on the small of her back without cringing. She bailed on plans with Veronica, weekend after weekend. She dodged Archie’s calls when Veronica worried Betty was mad at her ( _He’ll corrupt you too, I know you’re still talking to him.)_. 

Betty did was she was always best at: she followed instructions.     

  
  
  


 

 

When Betty wakes up gasping from a vivid dream where the whispering voice called her with Veronica’s screams of pain in the background, she gives in to Cheryl’s request. 

2:42am brings her back to Cheryl’s cal-king silk sheets, with her cousin stroking her hair and reminding her _it’s over, he can’t hurt her and he can’t hurt you. It’s all over._    

 

 

* * *

 

 

Jughead goes back to Betty’s store two days later for more books. He goes all the way home to shower after his shift, which he tells himself is to retrieve a backpack for his purchases and not simply because he doesn’t want to reek of fry-grease when he talks to Betty. 

She eyeballs him as the stack of books on the edge of the counter grows taller. “Are you leaving anything on the shelves for the rest of the true crime junkies?” 

Biting back a grin, Jughead merely shrugs. “You can borrow them when I’m done.” 

While he does grab a new copy of _In Cold Blood—_ he briefly hopes one of the used copies on the shelf might be his, but there is no blue-inked crown on the inside cover—and picks up _The Stranger Beside Me, I’ll Be Gone in the Dark,_ and _Devil in the White City_ , Jughead also diversifies his purchases. A beat up copy of _The Outsiders,_ a collection of Whitman poems, a newer book titled _Rage Becomes Her_ for JB. 

Betty smirks when she picks up _Outsiders_ , “Feels a little too on the nose, even for you.” 

“Might as well play into my stereotype.” 

Her studious gaze is back, and Jughead can’t determine whether to feel offended or exposed. “I don’t think you’re one to fit into any particular box, Jughead Jones. Even if you _do_ plan to wear leather all the way into summer.” 

The leather jacket is stashed in his bike seat; he hasn’t been wearing it out and about since the night at the bar, only on drives to keep the wind and his demons at bay. He isn’t entirely sure when the last time he wore it around her was, whether it was all the way back when he stormed into the store. But she knows he still wears it in good weather all the same. 

“You stalking me, Betty Cooper?”    

All studiousness drops out of her expression, replaced by a tightening of her jaw and a clipped, “Casual observation is not stalking.” 

It is an odd nerve to strike, he thinks, when that is not an uncommon hyperbole to be thrown around colloquially. Yet somehow, it tracks against some of Betty’s other nervous tics he has noticed.  

“I know it isn’t,” Jughead answers gently. “Poor choice of words.” 

He is appropriately chastened, which must be apparent to Betty, who breezes past the conversational mishap with an uncharacteristically clumsy segue. “Is there anything from your old collection you’re itching to have back? I can add things to my next order, or set something aside when I sift through donations.”

Why she continually makes kind gestures after he—however intended or unintended—upsets her is beyond him. It catches him off guard every time, but it is slowly endearing her to him. 

Once he gets past how annoying it is at first. 

Jughead is used to relationships of practicality: the Serpents were there when his mother was not, and when FP wasn’t around, the younger Serpents had his back; Trula Twyst was most of his firsts because she lived next door to the Jones trailer; the fellow bartenders from his Toledo job were friends of convenience. At bare minimum, he and Betty owe each other neutral niceties because of their shared friends, and for JB’s sake. 

Clearly, Jughead keeps pushing her buttons. Yet here she is offering to help get his personal library collection off the ground. There is a lot in life that Jughead knows he doesn’t deserve; he, like many others, didn’t deserve to grow up in a cycle of poverty, he didn’t deserve to have an absentee mother, or rely on discounted school lunches. As if to balance out those karmic handouts, Jughead acted in a way that had repercussions he more than deserved. 

Either way he spins it, though, he can tell that he does not deserve kindness from Betty. That she seems willing to extend it to him regardless might make him wary of ulterior motives, but he has heard enough from JB and Fangs that Betty is not the kind of person who would do that. (Whether Jughead is that kind of person seems to change by the hour.) Her sincerity is disarming, and his skin crawls with discomfort over it. 

For whatever reason, Betty is nice to him. It makes him want to hop on his bike and ride all the way back to Toledo, but instead he scribbles a couple of titles on a pink sticky note that Betty presses into a notebook by the register. 

There is the barest brush of her fingers against his when she takes the piece of paper, one that sends a shiver down his spine. He looks up—whether to apologize, he’s not sure—to see that Betty is blinking down at her fingertips, another blush rising.  

He wonders what he’s done to deserve the sweet pink splotches spreading down her neck at his touch.   

 

 

* * *

 

 

Things have settled between her and Jughead, Betty thinks. While they haven’t addressed the incident at the bar by name, the pair of them had some to a silent agreement to move beyond their first fraught meetings. 

Mutual—somewhat grudging—acceptance.   

They certainly are not friends; Betty still finds him condescending and full of himself, and she gets the feeling she still rubs him the wrong way, for whatever reason. 

(Whether or not Betty is remembering flashes of dreams where they both rub each in exactly the right way is a matter for her and her subconscious to sort out. It’s merely that Jughead is the first mildly date-able straight guy she has interacted with since leaving Boston. It is no way because she finds it adorable how that one curl can't stay under his worn-out beanie, or that JB talks about him like her big brother is Superman in leather, or how that night outside the bar she really had hoped he was looking at her ass.) 

(The idea of being wanted in that way again used to scare her. Jughead may be a bit of a jackass, but he does not scare her. She might even _want_ him to want her like that. Being wanted in that way, by someone who annoys her, feels safer in a way. Less vulnerable; less to lose.)

All this to say, Betty doesn’t hate it when Kevin wheedles and gives her puppydog eyes until she agrees to go to Riverdale Motors with him after they close. 

“Come on,” he begs. “Fangs just wants to hang out and play, and I quote, _normal people board games_.” Betty relents and doesn't hate it when she feels the red wine warm her while playing Uno with her friends, and now some new quasi-friends.

But when Jughead slips in the side door to cheers from Toni and Sweet Pea and both Fangs’s and Kevin’s gazes slide over to her in apprehension, Betty hates the way that shame washes over her. 

She hates how Kevin’s trauma comment rings in her ears and how it sours the taste of the wine in her mouth; her earlier excitement—however slight it may have been—at seeing Jughead is spoiled by this reminder that her scars run deep enough for those around her to see. 

Betty watches Jughead realize that Kevin and Fangs are watching her, before his questioning expression turns her way. She sees the confusion on his face, watches it melt into irritation as he assumes the group of them have been talking about him. 

His scowl sets off a pang in her gut. 

The overwhelming impulse of _I want to go home_ is too strong to ignore. “Kev, come get more wine with me?” Betty gestures toward the back office. The ruse is practically useless, nobody else pays attention and Jughead is pointedly keeping eye contact with Sweet Pea as they talk. 

Her voice is brittle and thick with tears once they're alone. “Cheryl is still at work. Will you take me home?” 

Betty hates the pity in his eyes, hates her own tear-stained face reflected in his pupils. Mercifully, Kevin must realize that his reaction isn't helping and he blinks into neutrality. “Only if you bake me something once we get there.” 

She bakes chocolate chip cookies because it's the only thing she has all the ingredients for. If Kevin notices that Betty doesn’t go to the guesthouse check her pantry for baking alternatives, or to get the sweatpants she changes into, he doesn’t say so. 

Instead he plies her with idle gossip about some of the store regulars, shares a few golden-era stories about his youth, even pulls up a high school photo of Fangs and company to prove that Sweet Pea was, in fact, practically a string bean prior to hulking out. Betty notices that Kevin swipes past a group photo that includes Jughead to pull up one that is just Fangs and Sweet Pea. 

“So is that where the ridiculous name comes from?” Betty asks, popping some chocolate chips into her mouth before handing the rest of the bag to him. 

“That is some Fort Knox level secrecy, so I’ve learned. Sweets’s real name isn’t as locked down as Jughead’s, but neither of them give it up willingly.”

Betty takes this information about Jughead in stride, files it away for later. 

Kevin’s yawns eventually pass over to her and they’re both yawning into the warm cookies. “I’m going to bed, I can’t keep my eyes open.”

“Ugh, me neither, but Fangs wants me to go back over there,” Kevin rolls his eyes. 

“Take the cookies, then.”

“You're sure?”

Betty sighs. “Yeah, tell them it’s my apology for bailing.” 

Kevin's eyebrows go sky high. “Tell them, or tell _him_?” Betty blushes, Kevin notices, and then says, “Betty Cooper are you blushing about a man? _This man_?” When she busies herself with the dishes in the sink, it’s not so much to avoid Kevin’s probing look as it is to hide the redness that she can feel getting worse and spreading down her neck. 

“Oh, we are so talking about this tomorrow.”

“Get out, Kevin,” she chides. 

He leaves with an emphatic _mhmm_ , and Betty switches the faucet to cold water before splashing some on her face. 

In the morning, Betty uses cold water to treat her flaming cheeks again. This time because she’s woken up to a text from an unknown number that simply reads: **_thanks for the cookies._ **

 

 

* * *

 

 

God knows what compelled him to text Fangs later that night, asking him to tell Betty that the cookies were great, nor what was going through his head when, after a perfunctory _tell her yourself_ paired with a shared contact file from Fangs, Jughead actually did tell her himself. 

It was not the (singular) beer he drank. He purposely limited his intake after Betty disappeared from the garage within minutes of his arrival so as to not drink himself into a self-loathing spiral. 

( _Aw look who’s showing growth,_ says the JB-like voice in his head.) 

It wasn’t even the blatant lie Kevin made up about his sudden craving for cookies and Betty’s subsequent headache. 

No, Jughead tells himself, in this new brutal honesty that his brain has thrust upon him. He texts her because he wants to. 

That in and of itself is a can of worms Jughead doesn’t particularly want to open, but he can at least acknowledge that the can is there. He brushes off the lack of response when, on his midmorning break from Pop's his phone is devoid of notifications. He didn't exactly open up a conversation. 

So he is floored when the response he does get is Betty herself in the middle of the lunch rush. He blinks, narrowly avoiding a collision with Midge and her tray of double cheeseburgers. Rooted to the spot, Jughead isn't sure if she is expecting him to walk over to her, if she’s just there for lunch and has no plans to talk to him, or if he should just die on the spot. He is saved by the fry cook calling up an order for one of his booths and then there are more orders for more booths, and by the time he can stand still for more than ten seconds, Betty is seated at the counter and nonchalantly eating a plate of fries. 

“Coffee?” he offers, slipping past Pop behind the counter and picking up the fresh pot before anybody else can. 

“I’m okay,” she answers, smiling almost in apology when she looks up to see that the pot and a clean mug are already in hand. “I’m trying to cut back on my caffeine.” 

In a move worthy of someone far smoother than he, Jughead shrugs and fills the mug anyway, then takes a sip for himself. “More for me.” 

“Of course you drink your coffee black,” Betty says with a roll of her eyes. 

“And I’m sure you drink yours with more creamer than coffee and 2 Splenda.” There’s bite in his voice, but he hopes the grin on his face cuts it. “See, two can play this game.” 

“Nope.” She pops her lip on the ‘p’ and Jughead can’t help but stare at the dark pink of her lipstick and wonder what it would look like stained on his collar. “Splash of milk, no sugar.” 

He squints, exaggerating how he sizes her up. “Fine, but I bet you’re waiting on a plain grilled cheese and a vanilla shake.” 

Two seconds later Midge sets down a grilled cheese with tomato and a strawberry milkshake between them. Betty chews on her bottom lip, clearly not ready to cede this point. Jughead sees the exact moment when she decides to give in, a light blush staining her cheeks. “Close enough.”

He leans in, feeling cocky, and snatches some of her fries. “What’s my prize, Betty Cooper?”

The blush turns darker. “The satisfaction of being right?”

“Ah,” he says. “But I’m almost always right, so I live in a world of satisfaction. It’s okay, I’ll give you time to think of something really good.”

Betty rolls her eyes at him again and he finds it infuriatingly endearing. Never before has he been so bewildered by someone. He can’t accuse her of running hot and cold on him when he has been doing the same on a much larger and far more obnoxious scale, but something about it bothers him. 

He takes a few more sips of coffee while Betty starts on her sandwich—why anybody would ruin a perfectly good grilled cheese with soggy tomato is beyond him—and tries to find the best approach to ask his next question. 

“So, is there a reason you keep running away from me or something?” 

Even Jughead cringes at the lack of finesse. Betty looks startled but regards him thoughtfully while she finishes her bite. 

“I had a headache last night.” 

He scoffs. “You’re a terrible liar.” 

The heat of her stare is intense but he is glad when she gives up the weak pretense. “It is a very long, very complicated story that very few people have earned the right to hear.” 

It’s diplomatic of her; she isn’t telling him he doesn’t deserve the answer, nor is she trying to evade his question. Betty’s response is still blunt and honest, and does not answer the what he asked. Jughead can appreciate that.  

“Okay,” he nods. The rapid blinks he gets in answer tell him that she was expecting him to press her on it. Jughead likes that he’s surprised her. He drinks more of his coffee and watches the chaos of lunch fade out through the front door. Betty is watching him, he can tell, but he isn’t sure how to carry on their conversation. 

Instead, he turns around to pull a clean mug from under the counter. There’s fresh decaf coffee brewing and he sneaks the pot out to fill the mug right from the drip, then fills a small pitcher with milk. 

He places his peace offering in front of Betty. “Decaf,” he tells her. “In case you’re missing the taste along with the caffeine.” 

Once again, she looks surprised, though less so than before. He sees now that the brightness under her eyes is manufactured: makeup smoothed over dark circles, ones that could rival his own. But usually when his own exhaustion is that prominent he drinks more coffee, not less. “Thank you, Jughead.” 

Nodding to her again, he begins to empty his apron pockets and untie the strings, the exhaustion of his shift creeping up his neck. Everything goes into his locker in the back room and the punch of the time clock is a welcome satisfaction. Instead of pushing through the back entrance to where his bike is parked, though, Jughead walks back through the kitchen and front counter, where Betty is stirring her coffee and staring into space. 

“Betty?” he calls out, soft enough to not draw attention to their conversation, but loud enough to clear the clinking of cutlery and order shouts in the back. When she looks up, she shakes her head a little as though clearing her mind of whatever she’d been thinking of. Her eyes glimmer a little extra and Jughead isn’t sure if it’s the fluorescents or tears.  “I hope I earn the right someday.” 

 

 

* * *

 

 

Jughead is more or less a fixture in Mysterious Letters now. Sometimes he’ll browse or make light conversation—usually about JB or whatever book Betty is reading behind the counter—but usually he ends up slouched in an armchair with a pen in his teeth and a book in hand. 

It’s hard not to be distracted by his intermittent scribbling with those long damn fingers and the pen cap clutched between his teeth. Betty finds herself purposely leaning her back on the counter while reading in order to keep him out of her periphery; he is too engrossed to notice her blatant avoidance, which also means he is too engrossed to notice when she is blatantly watching him. 

Kevin caught her once, hand mid-page turn, while Jughead removed his beanie to run his hands through his hair and then readjust the hat. The blush went so high up her neck at Kevin’s eyebrow waggle that Betty had to go into the office to collect herself. 

Usually, he comes around on the days JB has tutoring and seeing them interact causes an ache in the Polly-shaped hole in her heart, but she tries to overcome that pang when she thinks about how happy JB is to have him around. She has always been happy-go-lucky in her own sardonic kind of way, and it's only intensified when Jughead greets her at the store after school and then drives her home after she and Betty work together. 

(If possible, being a good sibling makes Jughead all the more attractive to Betty, and it is starting to drive her nuts.) 

In this way, it is endearing how Jughead’s expression falls into a dignified pout when JB informs him one Friday that she doesn’t need a ride. 

“I’m going to that party with Jacob and Allie, remember? Allie just got her license so she’s picking me up from here.” 

Sure enough, the horn of a bright orange Jeep Wrangler blasts from where it idles next to Jughead’s bike. “Bye, Betts! Bye Jug!” 

“Have fun,” Betty calls after her. 

Jughead’s offering is more brotherly: “Be safe!” He cringes as he says it and JB turns to stick her tongue out at him. 

The bell on the door jingles as it shuts behind her, muffling the excited shouts of her friends. 

“It’s nice to see her act like such a kid,” Jughead muses. His tone is almost wistful, and it’s then that Betty remembers that he did not get much a childhood himself. He must not have, not if he and all his best friends joined a gang as teenagers. That is something they must have all grown up with, not an out of the blue choice once legally able to drive. 

And Betty knows, through JB, that the former-Mrs. Jones is no peach; FP, too, sounds like he was a vastly different person, if he had once run a gang. He seems to have shaped up in the years past, but she wonders how much of that had to do with a lifestyle change out of necessity, or one out of choice once JB came home. 

Even more, Betty wonders how it must have felt like for Jughead to come back to his hometown to see how much it all has changed. When she thinks about it, she cannot blame him for the confused anger at seeing the establishment of his youth be turned into a business run by an out-of-towner. Or—the confusion, yes. Jury’s still out on how she feels about his temper.

She has yet to see it flare up like that again, but Betty knows she only sees a fraction of his life. Just as he only sees a fraction of hers. 

“How old was she when your mom left?” 

Tension practically shoots up his spine, posture straightening out with a sharp glare in her direction. 

Ex-Mrs. Jones is a sore subject for both Jones siblings, it would seem, though JB treats the subject of her mother with a forced nonchalance. That is nothing compared to the baleful expression Jughead aims at her now. 

“I’m not trying to pry,” Betty backtracks. “JB only mentions your mo— _her_ in passing. She told me she had only been back home with your dad for a few months when I moved here. It’s always sounded a little like she barely knew FP so I didn’t know how long she was away.” 

Jughead must sense his own defensiveness and breathes out heavily through his nose. His back relaxes a fraction, but jaw remains clenches when he answers. “I was sixteen, JB was ten. Dad was different back then, so in a way, I barely know him myself right now.” His hands begin to fidget, a habit Betty can spot a mile away in a perfect stranger. Where her own nails dig into her palms, or where JB chews on hangnails, Jughead spins a bulky metal ring on his left middle finger. A few other plain bands are stacked in a haphazard way, as though he constantly moves them between digits. 

Unsure how she never noticed these before, Betty narrows her focus to the rings themselves in an effort to stop wondering about _other_ ways those fingers might move. On rings, on belt buckles. Against warm skin. 

“It’s good she has normal parties to go to,” Jughead murmurs. “I’d rather her worst worry be about getting too drunk on bottom shelf vodka than about her tires being slashed by a gangbanger.” 

“Or worry about grade point averages and college applications.” Betty hadn’t meant to say that out loud, to mention the stressors of her privileged upbringing in the face of Jughead’s and JB’s drastically different lives. “I only mean,” she says to the sardonic look on his face. “She stresses about her grades, no matter what I tell her. I think a lot of her classmates have helicopter parents hellbent on Ivies—” _like mine were and look where that got me_ “ _—_ and I’m happy she lets herself cut loose.” 

“She’ll be first-gen.” Wistful again, but there is more pride to Jughead’s tone than anything else. “I would love for her to go to college. If that’s what she wants, obviously.” A weight lifts from Betty’s chest that she didn’t know was there. JB is _such_ a good kid, and a strong student when she puts her mind to it, and she is absolutely college material. The way she’s pressed on it lately, mentioning SAT dates and SAT II subjects and her friends’ scores with a brand new urgency, Betty had worried about external pressures. The peer pressure is not easy to avoid, but Betty is relieved that JB does not have FP or Jughead driving their own agendas with her schoolwork. 

Not like the Coopers had with her. 

She knows, though, that JB’s motivation must have a little to do with making her big brother proud. “You should tell her that,” Betty encourages him. “I think it’ll help her to know you won’t push her in either direction.” 

He nods, lost in his own thoughts. “I always hated the idea of college—the institution of the whole thing, the stupid honor cords at high school graduation, comparing application lists to all your friends, fighting for top spots in a high school class of, what, two hundred max? It was an entire orchestra of tiny violins that I did not want to play in. Why sink yourself into debt just for some letters on your name, you know?” Betty swallows. She had been valedictorian, had all the honor cords, had everything going for her at her pick of schools. Jughead would have hated her in high school. 

In retrospect Betty also hates who she was in high school, at least in part. 

Sighing, he says, “Doesn’t seem so bad now, though.” 

“You could always try out some classes at Greendale Community, or even online,” Betty suggests. “I’ve looked into some of those myself, if you want any of the information or course catalogs. I almost registered for classes this current semester, but second-guessed myself and never went in to do it. But there are a ton of options and I’m pretty sure they run a summer term, so you could even start as soon as June, I think. You’ll have to let me know if you do it, I’d love to hear how the classes are, I actually miss school even more now that I’m working on homework with JB so often.” Her mind runs away with her, nostalgic for all the classes she missed and the learning opportunities stolen from her. It is true that she had looked into finishing her degree at Greendale, but chickened out before even making it into the admissions office.  

Jughead seems to snap back to himself, eyeing her. The scorn in his voice comes back easily, derision now aimed at her instead of the college market. “What, little miss _summa cum laude_ Ivy League needs a few more credits to her name?” 

“I don’t have a degree, actually,” Betty levels back. She needn’t have bothered, because Jughead keeps going and doesn’t hear her. 

“You know you’re taking class spots away from people who actually need to be there, right? Students like JB, who don’t have parents to sign tuition checks, or buy storefronts for them so they can have pet projects when their liberal arts degree doesn’t get them a job? Or was it that you got bored of your $80k role  _earned_ through nepotism and wanted to do something _for yourself_?” 

Jughead is furiously flipping one ring between thumbs, not even looking at Betty as he rails against her with no ground to stand on, but no awareness of that fact to even care. 

“Fuck you, Jughead.” 

He falters. “Excuse me?” 

“Fuck you.” The first one had slipped out, this next one comes rushing out like a dam has burst in her heart. Her pulse is racing, the anger that has been simmering for so long now at a full boil, but her voice is deadly calm. “Get out of my store. That I paid for myself, by the way. With a _loan,_ from a _bank._ I am not some spoiled little rich girl who cannot fend for herself. And even if I were, you don’t know anything about me, and you have no right to judge me.” 

It is almost a complete reversal of how they met: Betty’s fury meets Jughead’s confusion and Jughead is slowly edges away from the counter, toward the front door. 

“It’s great and all that you think you’ve gotten me down to T, because you don’t like that I bought your stupid dive bar or that I’m friends with your friends, or that you think I’m going to steal your sister away from you. Hate me all you want, but at least hate me for me, and not the picture-perfect Barbie doll you’ve created in your head to hate. 

Because the Barbie doll is the one with high honors at an Ivy school. But this woman in front of you? She dropped out of college two years in because the serial killer stalking her told her to, and then tried to kill her. And that is the woman who is telling you to get the fuck out of her store.” 

 

 

* * *

 

 

Jughead is nauseous. 

He doesn’t throw up, not ever. Call it some ingrained self-preservation, but he has never once been so sick that he threw up a meal, not when meals were not always a guarantee growing up. 

On the front walk of Riverdale Motors, though, his stomach heaves dangerously. 

It is partially because he just unleashed a disgusting amount of undeserved anger at Betty, who has witnessed more of his bad temper than any one person should. The rest of the nausea comes from the search results for ‘boston + stalker + serial killer,’ where the prominent news stories are about a young pillar of the community who one day decided to put on a black hood and start killing people. 

Six people to be exact. Nicholas St. Clair, aged 37, is charged with six counts of first-degree murder, one count of stalking, two counts of aggravated assault, and one count of attempted murder. An article dated from the end of the previous year says he is set to go to trial in the next few months. 

The murder victims are all listed out with their varying CODs, though the attempted murder victim is unnamed. _The unnamed female victim was found unconscious in her home by members of a private investigation firm, who apprehended the assailant after he fled through a window when interrupted while attempting to strangle the young woman to death._

_For her privacy, the female victim remains unnamed._

Betty. 

_Betty’s_ name is withheld, most likely because of that private investigation firm—the firm that Jughead has a feeling is on retainer with Blossom Industries. 

Betty who sells used books and tutors JB and makes a mean chocolate chip cookie. Betty who he just unfairly yelled at, who then very fairly told him to fuck off. 

Jughead presses one hand against the side door of the garage, leans over, and empties the contents of his stomach onto the ground. 

 

 

* * *

 

 

Once again, Betty finds herself shaking behind the counter of Mysterious Letters after Jughead Jones has unceremoniously left the building. 

She feels a little sick to her stomach, but the anger coursing through her feels satisfying—freeing. 

Never before, she realizes, has she allowed herself to be mad about what happened. Frustrated, sure. Irritated by the injustice. Out of her mind terrified, and then mad at herself for being so terrified. 

And while she is certainly mad that Jughead unfairly judged her again and acted like an absolute dick again, now that he’s left, the anger is not directed toward him but it is still there. It buzzes under her skin like electricity, empowering in a way Betty has not felt in years. 

Yes, fuck Jughead for being such a jackass. 

But more importantly: _fuck_ Nicholas St. Clair for doing this to her. 

 

 

* * *

 

 

Fangs must hear him retching outside, because he pokes his head through the EMPLOYEES ONLY entrance and raises an eyebrow. “Isn’t it a little early to be drunk?” 

Shame washes over him; Fangs isn’t ribbing him, it is a genuine question. Jughead feels the weight of his name and his father’s legacy—the good and the bad—so acutely that his stomach turns again. 

Spitting out another mouthful of bile, Jughead looks up to his friend—the one who has had his back since grade school, judgement free, and is always willing to pick his ass up from the ground when he’s fallen. “I fucked up, Fangs. _Bad.”_

At least he can admit it this time. 

Fangs ushers him inside and through to the office. It is still business hours and people are milling about, and he stops to tell someone Jughead remembers might be named Viper that Mrs. Jameson is picking up her Honda before closing. 

He’s never been in the office before. After hours, there are enough of their friends hanging around that sitting in the open space on benches and stools makes more sense than cramming into what he now knows to be a shoebox office with two desks and one beat-up armchair. The desk that must be FP’s is cluttered with paperwork and coffee mugs, but there is a corkboard hanging above it with photographs: one of Jughead’s arms around JB when they’re kids, FP and Gladys in semi-formal wear on the steps of Riverdale City Hall—their wedding, he realizes—and one of a teenaged JB looking exasperated but holding up a printed paper with a great big ‘A’ on it in blue marker. Likely an English essay that Betty helped her with. 

_Jesus Christ,_ he sighs. 

“What happened?” Fangs asks, not unkindly but with an edge that tells him his friend is not surprised that something has gone wrong. 

“I acted like a dick to Betty over absolutely nothing”—his friend heaves a sigh of his own and rolls his eyes—“And, uh, I hit a nerve. A bad one. She yelled at me, well actually just told me really, she was freakishly calm, about what happened in Boston. When she—she was, uh—”

Jughead chokes on his words, remembering the fury in Betty’s eyes but also the triumph in proving him so drastically wrong about her. 

“Jesus, Jug.” Fangs grinds the heels of his hands into his eyes. “Hang on, I need to call Kev to go check on her.” 

Fangs steps out of the office and he hears his muffled voice talking rapidly into his phone. He stares at the photos pinned above FP’s desk until they blur. 

“Okay,” Fangs says quietly as he shuts the door behind him. “Kevin is already with her.” 

“Is she okay?” Jughead croaks. 

There is a modicum of pride in his voice when Fangs answers. “She is.” 

Thinking back to that newspaper article— _while attempting to strangle the young woman to death—_ he asks again. “Is she _okay,_ though? In general?” 

“She’s strong.” Jughead nods; there’s no way somebody survives something like that otherwise, and before now, he had always seen that quiet strength in her. “I don’t know how things were when she first moved here, she was mostly glued to Cheryl back then and none of us saw either of them much. Once she opened the store, she was around town a lot, and even since then she has become much more… herself, I suppose.” 

“Right.” 

He stares at the floor, miserable, and begging the cracked cement to open up and swallow him whole. 

“You owe her an apology.” 

“I do.” 

Fangs pushes himself off the desk and says, matter-of-fact, “Good, as long as you know. I’ve got customers.”  

 

       

* * *

 

 

Funny enough, the night that Betty reveals her past to Jughead, she sleeps soundly for the first time in weeks. 

After throwing him out of Mysterious Letters, Betty thought he may have come back that night. Through Kevin—who had shown up just to ask Betty if she wanted to go for pizza, not expecting to see flames of anger radiating off her—she knows that Jughead went right to Fangs after leaving the store, and after a quick Google search. 

She also knows that there are no traces of her name anyway within the news coverage of the original Black Hood stories, aside from the tiny police blotter pieces she wrote, nor in any of the coverage of the Black Hood’s reveal as St. Clair, the upstanding citizen nobody could have expected such horrors from. Betty has alerts set up for her own name, and Cheryl’s top-dollar investigative firm keeps tabs on everything else. If there were any inkling that Betty Jean Cooper was the unnamed seventh victim in the Black Hood’s reign of terror, they would hear about it within minutes. 

The only true way for people to hear about it is from Betty herself. It is why she shows no surprise when the next morning, before she has finished turning on the lights or even unlocked the front door, Jughead Jones is waiting for her at the steps of Mysterious Letters. 

Unlike Fangs and Kevin had been when Betty first told them, Jughead does not look shaken or on the verge of hysterics. He is as calm as Betty feels. 

Still, though, she does not make eye contact with him as she pulls up the blinds and undoes the three locks on the door. Instead, she turns on her heel and moves behind the counter to finish her opening routine: unlocking the till, turning on the speakers, booting up the business computer. She hears the door jingle its way open but carries on, humming along to the banjo line of the first song that queues up on the store playlist. 

“Sweet Pea, Toni, and I all had guns to our head when Fangs and my dad showed up to save our asses.” 

Betty blinks, startled. “What?” When she whirls around, Jughead is right there. The counter space is between them but she still jumps a little at his closeness. Pain flashes ever so briefly across his face, then he takes three strides backwards and half-lifts his hands in an apology—possibly a surrender.

She opens her mouth to say something but—  

“Please,” he stops her. “Just let me tell you too much about _my_ past. Then we’re even. Or, then I’ve at least leveled the playing field to a degree where we’re closer to even and I’m much less of an asshole.” 

Her stomach twists in knots, but Jughead’s expression is one of genuine compassion—trepidation, even, on his part of having to share, but not a trace of pity. 

She nods, indicates for him to continue while she flips on the kettle and pulls out a french press. Two mugs. The Kona coffee Kevin brought back from his trip to Hawaii with Fangs, that Betty brews only when particular situations arise. 

This exact situation is unclear, but it seems deserving of strong coffee.  

“I’m not sure how much Fangs has told you, but we were all in pretty deep with my dad’s gang. It hadn’t been ...harmless, not by any means, but the Serpents weren’t exactly Sharks and Jets level of violence. Nobody died. Nobody even _nearly_ died. That part’s—” he swallows hard and Betty reaches out for where he’s leaned up on the counter before she can help herself. “That part was all my fault.”   

Her hand pauses, hovering over his forearm, then lands on the wood next to it. Not quite touching, but still very close. 

“You don’t have to tell me this, Jughead.” He doesn’t, and something in his look tells her that he knows he doesn’t, but is going to anyway. 

“I know…” Betty watches him swallow back his hesitation. “But I’d like for you to hear it from me anyway.” 

  
  


.

.

.

 

_tbc_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this would be a mess and/or not done at all without the extraordinary help and encouragement of iconicponytail. 
> 
> pleasepleaseplease leave a comment if you can. they keep me going, and it is always nice to know that you're still interested even after I left this to flounder for nearly 6 months.


End file.
